The One-Dimensional Society

Bolshevism destroyed everything in Russia, starting with the weak and ineffective Provisional Government, followed by private property, the peasant commune and the Church. Everything connected with Lenin was anti-capitalist, anti-democratic, anti-liberal, anti-reformist, anti-human and anti-Christian. There can scarcely have been another man in history who managed so profoundly to change so large a society on such a scale.

Perhaps the single most characteristic feature of the new society was its one-dimensionality, its uniformity. The infinite variety of social and intellectual life, culture, historical tradition and the creative potential of millions of people was reduced to the harsh, uniform, uncompromising ideological paradigm of Leninism. Dogmatic thinking, totalitarian bureaucracy, authoritarianism and irrational fear became the characteristic features of the new society.

The pages of Soviet history after 1924 are filled with the invariable call: ‘Back to Lenin!’ Society was gripped by the idea of him, and at critical moments his successors raised their eyes to this icon of Soviet godliness and called for his spirit to come to their aid. In October 1927, as he was defeating the Trotskyist opposition at the Fifteenth Party Conference, Stalin summoned Lenin as an ally: ‘You know,’ he said, ‘in 1921 Lenin proposed to expel Shlyapnikov from the Party … just because he dared to make some critical remarks about the Council of National Economy inside a Party cell.’ That had been a good enough reason for Stalin, and he went on: ‘People are talking about the arrest of disorganizers who were expelled and who are now carrying on anti-Soviet work. Yes, we are arresting them, and we're going to go on arresting them, if they don't stop undermining the Party and the Soviet regime.’ His remarks were greeted by shouts of ‘Quite right! Correct!’¹ The lesson Stalin wanted to convey was that he, and they, must be just as merciless to their enemies as Lenin had been.

The return to Lenin and his aggressive form of ‘defence’ became the Communist norm and the rule of Party life: ‘Lenin bequeathed …’, ‘it says in Lenin …’, ‘the Leninist way to do it is …’. When on 25 February 1956 Khrushchev made his famous speech in the Kremlin, ‘On the Cult of Personality and its Consequences’, Lenin's shade hovered in the hall. Indeed, Khrushchev, his head thrown back, pronounced: ‘Lenin taught …’, ‘Lenin always stressed the rôle of the people …’, ‘Under Lenin, the Party Central Committee was a genuine expression of collective leadership …’.

The nub of the cult of personality was that Stalin had forgotten Lenin's teaching. Even Lenin's cruelty, according to Khrushchev, was of a different order from Stalin's: ‘And who will say that Lenin did not resort to the cruellest measures against the enemies of the revolution, when really necessary? No, no one can say that. Vladimir Ilyich called for the harsh punishment of enemies of the revolution and the working class and when the need arose he used such methods with utter ruthlessness. Just recall V.I. Lenin's struggle against the SR organizers of anti-Soviet risings, against the counter-revolutionary kulaks in 1918 and others … But Lenin was using such measures against real class enemies …’² If the class enemy was a ‘real’ one, everything was permitted.

On 27 April 1921, the Politburo under Lenin's chairmanship appointed Tukhachevsky as commander-in-chief of the Tambov region. He was given one month to put down a peasant rebellion, and told to report in writing every week on his progress. Tukhachevsky could not meet his deadline, but he did his level best. On 12 June 1921 he issued the following orders:

The remnants of the defeated bands and individual bandits … are gathering in the forest and carrying out raids on peaceful inhabitants. 1. The forest where the bandits are hiding must be cleared with poison gas; careful calculation must be made to ensure that the cloud of asphyxiating gas spreads throughout the forest and exterminates everything hiding there; 2. The artillery inspector must immediately release the required number of poison gas balloons and necessary specialists to the localities.³

It is hard to imagine what sort of peasants could be designated as ‘real class enemies’ by the regime, but similar measures taken elsewhere were known to and approved by the Politburo.

Khrushchev's 1956 speech continued: ‘Stalin showed irreverence for Lenin's memory. It is no accident that the Palace of Congresses, which was agreed on thirty years ago as a monument to Vladimir Ilyich, was never built and was constantly postponed and the idea forgotten. We must correct the position and build this monument to Vladimir Ilyich.’ At this point the assembly interrupted the speaker with ‘stormy and prolonged applause’⁴—as if the country were not already inundated with Lenin monuments. It would have been hard to find a village, however out of the way, in which the farm-manager's office or the club or the square did not have a plaster, concrete or bronze Lenin. There was a dense network of Lenin museums, Lenin rooms, Lenin memorial sites, routes, libraries, streets, collective and state farms, one-horse towns and regions. The gigantic Central Lenin Museum had branches everywhere; a vast number of house- and apartment-museums where Lenin or members of his family had stayed were set up: a ship museum on the Yenisei, a barn museum and fisherman's cottage museum at Razliv, a funeral train museum. Lenin memorial sites were also established abroad, in Paris, Prague, Leipzig, Helsinki, Cracow and elsewhere. Even places Lenin had never visited were included: Bratislava, Ulan-Bator, Aden, Havana. No saint, autocrat or military leader was ever accorded such attention. Many people, hypnotized by the sheer scale of his greatness, believed in the holiness of the Bolshevik leader.

Perestroika was already a well-established idea when the Politburo debated its report for the seventieth anniversary of the October revolution. General Secretary Gorbachev, extolling Lenin's genius, said: ‘We wanted to build a bridge from Lenin, to connect Leninist ideas and Leninist approaches to the events of those years with the affairs of our own day. After all, the dialectic which Lenin used to solve problems is also the key to present-day tasks.’⁵ So, we Russians, above all the leadership, had held the alleged key in our hands, and yet somehow we had never managed to open the door to freedom, abundance and respect for human rights, and thus lagged farther and farther behind the caravan of civilization.

At the beginning of the century Lenin had said: ‘Give us an organization of professional revolutionaries and we will turn over all of Russia.’ The organization was given, and Russia and everything in it was ‘turned over’. The immoral became moral, the base became the elevated, catastrophes were proclaimed as great achievements, the defeat of the country as a huge revolutionary victory. As a result, there emerged the one-dimensional society with a one-dimensional personality. The means of accomplishing this had been the destruction of private property. Lenin had not understood that private property is in itself a complex and universal mechanism for the self-regulation of the economy. The shift to the Communist management of the economy inevitably demanded the replacement of economic levers by administrative ones, and thus was created the source of totalitarian bureaucracy. And since bureauracy cannot manage without dogmatism, the most important pillars of the one-dimensional society were erected. Every facet of society suffered, and it should not be forgotten that the same thing was planned for the whole world. As Lenin put it in 1920, the advance on Warsaw was to be an attempt ‘with the bayonet to probe Poland's readiness for social revolution’,⁶ after which eruptions in Germany and then the rest of the world were to follow.

The Deceived Vanguard

‘From A. Zedmidko to Comrade Beria: In order to develop the site, I request that another camp be organized for 5000 people, with 30,000 metres of tarpaulin for tents and fifty tonnes of barbed wire. 22 March 1947.’⁷ Beria, like other ministers, was accustomed to signing such orders for an additional allocation of the slaves who were building ‘the socialist society’. Behind miles of barbed wire, millions were trudging the Leninist path and making roads, building bridges, sinking mines and erecting power stations, working in scientific laboratories and design bureaux. Beria, as Interior Minister, was virtually the country's biggest ‘producer’; he employed the largest army of workers, all of them totally without rights. His reports to Stalin flowed in a constant stream: ‘On 13 April at 1700 hours the Magnitstroy NKVD commissioned Unit no. 4, consisting of sixty-five ovens, for industrial production at the chemical-coke factory at Nizhne-Tagilsk. It will provide 450,000 tonnes of metallurgical coke a year for Soviet industry. Construction is being completed of blast furnace no. 3, with a capacity of 1,050 cubic metres and an annual output of 450,000 tonnes of cast iron, to be commissioned in the last ten days of April 1944.’⁸

The archives teem with such reports, almost giving the impression that the entire working class had been resettled in the NKVD's miserable concentration-camp system. At the cost of millions of lives, this forced labour often achieved amazing results. In the year of Stalin's death, the hundreds of thousands employed in the gold fields raised the Soviet Union's gold reserves to 2,049.8 tonnes, the highest figure ever attained. Stalin's successors were never able to come anywhere near such figures, and they merely consumed what had been accomplished by the efforts of slaves—by 1991 the reserves were down to about 250 tonnes.

Opening the Twelfth Party Congress on 17 April 1923, Kamenev declared:

With the working class under Vladimir Ilyich's leadership, we have travelled a long, unprecedented path, unique in history … We are the only Communist Party which is no longer struggling for power but which is organizing the regime of workers and peasants, the only party with the chance to put the age-old tools of oppression at the service of the working class and all toilers. Our state is the first attempt to turn all these tools, the national wealth, the land, schools and education—everything that was created by labour and that was until now in the hands of the ruling classes and served only to oppress—to turn all this into tools for the emancipation of the toilers and to hand it all over to the working class. (Applause)⁹

Was it true that the working class had been made into an instrument of universal emancipation? Had everything been put into its hands? Was it really the vanguard of the revolution? Lenin, of course, had not given affirmative replies to these questions. In his State and Revolution, written on the eve of October 1917 and published in 1918, he had extolled the proletariat as a ‘special class’ which alone was ‘capable of being the leader of all the toiling and exploited masses … but the proletariat is not capable of struggling for its emancipation independently’.¹⁰As a perceptive politician, he knew he must take the working class with him if his plans were to be realized. And indeed, on the eve of the October coup, eighty per cent of the Petrograd Bolshevik organization consisted of workers. It was their choice of the Bolsheviks to lead them that made it possible for Lenin to convert a seemingly hazardous plot into reality, and it remained only for him to use the enormous force of the workers, who had come to believe that their fate was now in their own hands. Writing to Pavel Axelrod on 19 November 1917, Martov admitted that ‘nearly the entire proletariat is on Lenin's side and expects that the coup will lead to their social emancipation’.¹¹ The workers believed in the Bolsheviks, they believed in Lenin, and it was this that predetermined the success of the coup.

Did the proletariat become the ‘dominant force’? What did the working class gain from the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’? First, it should be noted that as a rule they were to be led by members of the intelligentsia, whom Lenin so disliked and whom he now ordered about as he chose. Virtually all the key posts were held by people who had never been inside a factory or workshop, and who had spent much of their lives abroad. Most of the ‘professional revolutionaries’ were not proletarians, and once they were in power they made haste to bring ‘representatives’ of the working class onto the Central Committee as a sort of political entourage. In fact, from October 1917 until August 1991, the Party and the country were led first by ‘professional revolutionaries’ and later by ‘party officials’ of the nomenklatura. To be sure, people with a working-class background, commonly factory engineers, often managed to rise to these high-ranking positions, but the system was so structured that such people quickly lost their proletarian character and were assimilated into the Party bureaucracy. The working class had as it were involuntarily delegated its power to a tenacious, imperious and all-seeing stratum of professional Leninist Party members.

On countless occasions Lenin had talked of the transfer of the industrial potential of the state into the workers' hands, claiming that ‘the workers, having won political power, will smash the old bureaucratic machine, reduce it to its foundations, and will replace it with a new one consisting of these same workers and employees, but taking immediate measures to ensure they do not become bureaucrats’.¹² The naivety of this notion was quickly revealed when the workers, having taken over the factories, became enslaved to an even greater degree. Everything was declared state property, and ordinary workers had only one right: to work and to keep on working, without striking (‘bourgeois sabotage’), and unable to advance any social or economic demands. Lenin and his party completely alienated the workers from the means of production. Meanwhile, the bureaucratic machine, created anew, surpassed the old one in its totality and cruelty.

It had seemed that the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ would give the workers opportunities to acquire a dominant position in the running of industry and the state. That indeed was what Lenin had meant by revolutionary democracy. This democracy, he declared, was a form of state whose essence was ‘the organized, systematic use of coercion’.¹³ Here he was a prophet, indeed: coercion and violence used on the working class there would be in abundance. His successor would put workers in prison for absenteeism and lateness, confiscate the peasants' identity cards in case they should try to escape from the countryside to the towns, and take away the right of a worker to move from one job to another.

It was not long after the revolution before the ‘vanguard’ was being exploited even more than under the tsarist regime. The constant reiteration by Lenin and his comrades of the workers' right to rule and to take decisions was nothing but political camouflage. It was the ‘professional revolutionaries’, the Party functionaries, who ruled, and who were the real high priests of the notorious dictatorship of the proletariat. The working class thus served as the most important mass instrument for the forced introduction of socialism in Russia. As Karl Kautsky wrote, however: ‘Soviet socialism is not socialism at all, for it arose not out of abundance and the “development of productive forces”, but out of scarcity and backwardness; militarized Communism is the result not of a revolutionary process, but of the disintegration brought about by domestic and foreign war.’¹⁴ Lenin in effect used the working class as the main force to reconstruct Russia in the socialist mode.

The very word ‘worker’ seemed to act like magic on Lenin. The formula ‘of working class origin’ aroused in him the highest level of trust in a man. On occasion he was seriously disappointed. The story of Roman Malinovsky is a case in point. Malinovsky, head of the St Petersburg metal-workers' union on the eve of the First World War, enjoyed Lenin's utter confidence. On Lenin's recommendation this talented speaker and organizer was appointed to the Party Central Committee at its Prague Conference in January 1912. Together he and Lenin travelled to Leipzig, and, as Zinoviev recalled, on his return Lenin expressed the highest opinion of Malinovsky. So impressed was he that he proposed that Malinovsky stand as a Bolshevik candidate in the forthcoming elections to the Russian parliament, the State Duma. In fact, in May 1910 Malinovsky had been recruited by the Okhrana, the tsarist secret police, and had been informing them regularly about the situation in the Bolshevik camp. His reports had led to the arrest of several Bolsheviks, including Stalin. It was the Okhrana who cleared the way for his election victory later that year, entrusting him with the task of maintaining the split between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in order to keep them both weak.

When suspicions were raised about Malinovsky, however, a commission consisting of Ganetsky, Zinoviev and Lenin could find no compromising evidence. In an article on the subject, Lenin wrote that the scoundrels who had cast a shadow on Malinovsky were ‘letting blackguards and vermin and skunks, ignored with contempt by the working class, root around in all this!’¹⁵

During the war Malinovsky fought in the Russian army. He was taken prisoner in 1915, and from his prisoner of war camp he quickly established contact with Lenin in Switzerland. After the February revolution, when ample proof of Malinovsky's treachery came to light, Lenin gave evidence to the Provisional Government's investigative commission, claiming that the secret police had accomplished nothing, except to help consolidate the ties between the Bolsheviks' underground operations and their legal newspaper, Pravda.¹⁶ In October 1918 Malinovsky returned voluntarily from captivity and was arrested. Lenin's only comment was: ‘What a swine! He really put one over on us. The traitor! Shooting's too good for him!’¹⁷ But in November 1918 that is what he got. The episode might have taught Lenin that a working-class background was no guarantee of dependability.

The Politburo continually sought ways of increasing the Party's influence among the workers, and in fact the construction of the industrial base of socialism bore a coercive character from the outset. Many sites—if not the majority—were built by prisoners who, from the late 1920s, always numbered several million. In August 1933, for instance, after the completion of the White Sea—Baltic Canal, it was agreed that the NKVD should take over the entire zone by settling it with new contingents of prisoners and exploiting mineral deposits and barge and tug-boat construction.¹⁸ More than ninety per cent of the projects in the canal zone were carried out by convict labour.

First Menzhinsky, then Yagoda and Beria, as the commissars responsible, maintained a constant demand for more and more people, and each project—the canal itself, roads, bridges and mines—cost thousands of lives. Stalin was especially concerned that this particular cauldron of hell should be kept on the boil. When Commissar of Heavy Industry Ordzhonikidze complained to him that Yagoda was not keeping up an adequate supply of labour, Stalin at once corrected the situation.¹⁹

In August 1937 the Politburo agreed to the construction of the Baikal—Amur railway line, and a year later confirmed the exact route the immense project would follow. Once again it was the NKVD that was to shoulder the responsibility for conducting the surveys, doing the work, and even for supplying thousands of horses.²⁰ In the same way, it was the NKVD that oversaw the building of the Norilsk mining plant, the huge Dnieper and many other similar hydro-electric stations.

Lenin is not commonly regarded as the originator of the use of slave labour, yet it was he who resorted to it as a means of rapid conversion to a socialist economy. Confronted by the chaos created by the revolution, Lenin saw no other solution than harsh regulations, coercion and control, policies presented as a new structure called ‘War Communism’. War Communism has always been associated with the civil war, and considered as a temporary policy which could be abandoned and replaced by the New Economic Policy as easily as it had been adopted. In fact, it was the basis and essence of Lenin's policy, and only its total collapse forced him to grab the lifebelt of NEP. War Communism, however, did not completely die, but survived in various forms even until the end of the 1980s.

The dominance of the state over society which Lenin approved, despite his repeated insistence on the ‘withering away of the state’, ensured the adoption of War Communism. Lenin believed that the concentration of industry and finance, and a total state monopoly on production, trade and prices, would bring socialism closer. Instead, it only brought closer a barracks form of War Communism, and despite the temporary phase of the NEP, Stalin returned to it when he applied Lenin's ideas to the collectivization of agriculture, the militarization of industry, the imposition of the GULAG on the national economy and the application of coercive management as absolutely socialist.

In Lenin's view, War Communism would lead to the future commune-state, a commune imbued with the proletarian consciousness he was to impart to it—although he hardly believed in it himself. The picture of the future he painted in his State and Revolution is shocking even today:

The more democratic the state, consisting of armed workers, the faster will any state begin to wither away. For then everyone will learn to run the economy independently, and independently monitor and control the spongers, the sons of the wealthy, the crooks and other ‘defenders of capitalist traditions’, then it will be so unbelievably hard to evade national accounting and control, it will be such a rare occurrence, and will no doubt be accompanied by such swift and harsh punishment (for the armed workers know about real life, they're not sentimental intellectuals and won't let anyone fool them), that the need to observe the simple and basic rules of any human society will quickly become a habit.²¹

Lenin was right at least in one respect: the Russian people did indeed soon come to regard the methods applied as natural, they did become a habit. It is for this reason that the notion of War Communism as a short-term stage in Soviet construction is unsustainable. After the brief flowering of the NEP, Stalin reapplied Lenin's War Communism in modernized and adapted form to his own ‘Leninist’ strategy. Even Stalin's monstrous assertion that ‘the further we move forward, the more we succeed, so the more embittered the remnants of exploiting classes will become, and the more quickly will they resort to more acute forms of struggle’,²² appears as the logical consequence of War Communist thinking.

Despite the collapse of War Communism, Lenin, and then Stalin, viewed it as a natural phase of the revolution. Even in the summer of 1917, Lenin had stated publicly that the move to socialism would be impossible without the kind of coercion and force characteristic of War Communism. In an interview with the bourgeois newspaper Den', he had stated frankly: ‘Historians of the proletariat see in Jacobinism one of the highest upsurges of the oppressed class in the struggle for emancipation.’²³ Others had seen in Lenin's policy a militaristic future for Russia, and not only ‘capitalist encirclement’. In his ‘Reflections on the Russian Revolution’, Peter Struve, the former Marxist revolutionary who then became a liberal politician and finally a religious philosopher, wrote in 1921: ‘It is important to note that Soviet Communism is in some respects a direct heir of what it was customary to call the war economy, war socialism or war regulation … War socialism regulated more or less relative scarcity.’²⁴

It was in the military sphere alone that Soviet Communism was able to compete with the Western democracies, for the most important indicator of the state's greatness was its might, and above all its military might. The boomerang always returns, however, and the military way of thinking and acting became one of the sources of erosion of ‘Lenin's cause’. In order to provide some sort of stimulus to efficient production, an effective substitute for personal material interest had to be found. Lenin found it in socialist competition, and indeed for as long as the people still genuflected before The Idea, for good or ill this stimulus worked. Millions believed they were accomplishing a ‘feat’, struggling ‘for honour’, carrying out ‘Lenin's bidding’. In the 1930s, by relying on and indeed by arranging individual examples and models of labour, Stalin enticed millions to fulfil and over-fulfil their appointed tasks. This was perhaps the moral peak of War Communism in its efforts to find non-economic stimuli for raising production.

The example of Alexei Stakhanov is well known. In 1935, at the Central Irmino coal mine, he established a fantastic record of production. With the assistance of the local Party organizers, Stakhanov's efforts were used as a means to whip up enthusiasm in other sectors. Soon A. Busygin, a smith, achieved a new record, then P. Krivonos, a machine-worker, followed by M. Mazai, a metal-worker, and so on. For Stalin, it did not matter if the quality of output was falling, if accidents and breakages rose rapidly, even though he was to denounce this at the plenum on 3 March 1937 as sabotage. Stakhanov was important as a symbolic founder of the new Communist movement. The Central Committee set its propagandists to work writing books and pamphlets with such titles as ‘My Method’, ‘A Year in the Homeland of the Stakhanovite Movement’, ‘A Tale about Myself’, ‘The Story of My Life’, all of them signed, but in fact not even read, by Stakhanov. This was Stalin's way of replying to Lenin's question, ‘How to organize competition?’

The Stakhanovite movement was an attempt to use non-economic methods, plus ideological means and Party pressure, to raise industrial production rapidly. No doubt Stakhanov and his followers deserve respect, believing as they did that they were bringing the bright future closer. Not many then realized that the deep economic flaws in the system could not be hidden forever by such efforts, and although for many years the Party functionaries did their utmost to revive and resuscitate ‘socialist competition’, they failed. Economic laws, like the laws of nature, cannot be flouted forever.

Resorting again to Lenin's teaching, Stalin shifted the accent from material to moral incentives. There now appeared countless medal-bearers, Heroes and Heroines of Labour, shock-workers. It was reported in 1939 that for their ‘Stakhanovite labour’ 18,519 people in industry had been decorated, while 4318 village schoolteachers received medals, as did 1147 artists and 205 sportsmen. As official propaganda put it: ‘This could only happen in our country, where the toilers work for themselves, for their class … The leader of the people, Comrade Stalin, has said of the Stakhanovite movement that “it contains the seed of the cultural and technological rise of the working class, that it is showing us the way by which alone we can achieve the highest indicators of labour efficiency”.’²⁵ By stressing the importance of the Stakhanovite movement, Stalin was exposing his own crisis mentality. Such methods—exploiting enthusiasm, patriotism and moral exhortation—could only produce transient results. Material arguments were bound sooner or later to replace The Idea.

History is a dispassionate judge. Its mills grind slowly, but ceaselessly. The ‘grain of Communism’, which Stakhanov and his like thought they were growing, produced no burgeoning shoots; despite the fact that millions of honest people, led by the ‘vanguard of the revolution’, laboured for it, the utopia remained a fairy-tale. Even the rational nucleus of the idea of social justice found no worthy expression. The policy of levelling down meant that even the small gains that were made were reduced by the periodic deductions from wage-packets, disguised as ‘income redistribution’, that became common practice.

The working class had become the servant of the Party oligarchy. The peasantry got even less. Speaking at the Fourth Comintern Congress on 13 November 1922, Lenin was frank: ‘The peasants understand that we seized power for the workers and our goal is to create the socialist order with the help of their power.’²⁶ Frank, but disingenuous. He had not seized power for the workers, but for the Party oligarchy.

Peasant Predators

After Stalin's death, his successors made the purchase of grain from abroad one of their regular priorities. It was not that more grain had been produced under Stalin—on the contrary—but he had been able to keep the country on low rations and in general to regard the shortage of grain as of little significance. Khrushchev, Brezhnev and the other ‘true Leninists’, however, having repudiated Stalin's excesses, could not take the same cavalier attitude towards a basic source of the nation's nourishment and food for livestock. From 1957 on, vast quantities of grain were purchased from the USA, Canada and elsewhere.

On 16 August 1975, Brezhnev studied a note from the head of the Foreign Economic Trade Department, N. Patolichev. It was the kind of note Khrushchev had also received many times when he was in charge: ‘In addition to the 15.95 million tonnes of grain (which we reported to you last week), we have been able to buy another 1.95 million tonnes. This means that as of today we have bought 17.9 million tonnes.’ Patolichev added that, apart from the USA, grain had been purchased from Canada, Argentina, Romania and Australia, and that talks were in progress for further purchases from France, West Germany, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Argentina, Brazil and Australia. The aim, Patolichev concluded, was to bring the total amount purchased abroad to thirty million tonnes.²⁷ A further note explained that the grain would cost US$4.934 billion, and suggested that the sum could be raised by the sale of fifteen million tonnes of oil, 1.6 million tonnes of diesel fuel, petrol, fuel oil and, above all, 397 tonnes of gold. In the previous year the purchase of grain had been covered by the sale of only 265 tonnes of gold.²⁸ Meanwhile, Soviet financial managers were complaining that ‘selling the gold in the present situation is extremely difficult. There has been a marked fall in prices on the world's gold markets as demand has sharply diminished. While an ounce of gold was selling at $180-200 in December 1974, today it is worth only $141-146.’²⁹

The purchase of grain had become such an everyday matter for the Party leaders that it was being planned years in advance. For instance, in June 1977 the Politburo received a programme of foreign grain purchases, based on estimates supplied by the State Planning Agency, Gosplan, calling for a total of 47.4 million tonnes over the next four years. Over the same period, the country was expected to produce 362 million tonnes of its own grain. Together with imported grain, the authors of the report concluded, ‘we will be in a position to maintain the release of grain for consumption and seed requirements, as well as deliveries to Cuba, Vietnam, the Mongolian People's Republic, North Korea, and for processing in the quantities envisaged in the Five-Year Plan’. The report is embellished by the signatures of every member of the Politburo, from Brezhnev and Suslov to Romanov and Shcherbitsky.³⁰ The output of grain over these years was, of course, lower than predicted, while purchases abroad were considerably greater.

These figures go some way towards explaining where all the state's hard currency reserves went. According to memoranda approved by the Politburo, in the Five-Year Plan prior to 1977, 1214 tonnes of gold were sold for grain.³¹ This had evidently been insufficient, for it had been supplemented by the sale of fuels, copper, zinc, magnesium, chromium ore, aluminium, cellulose, coal, industrial diamonds, cotton, cars, tractors, machinery and much, much more.

It is obvious enough from all this that the Bolsheviks' plans for agriculture had failed. Russia had been turned from a large-scale exporter of grain into a regular importer. In the last twenty-five years during which the USSR bought grain abroad, Moscow was in effect financing the development of agriculture in other countries, instead of its own. In that time, the USSR transferred about 9000 tonnes of gold to Western banks. Only part of this was for grain—it was also buying meat, butter and other agricultural products. In 1977 alone, for instance, and only for ‘supplementary’ deliveries of meat, the Politburo had to sell an additional forty-two tonnes of gold abroad.³² Virtually all the gold the country produced, plus its hidden reserves, was being sold abroad to buy food. If the economic system had not been so distorted, these astronomical sums might have been used to make the country's own agricultural sector a model of balanced and profitable production. If, as has been seen, the highest volume of pure gold reserves was reached in 1953 at 2,049.8 tonnes,³³ then all the gold mined after that date, between 250-300 tonnes annually, was sold for grain.

Significantly less grain was produced before 1953 than after that year. The highest output of grain achieved during Stalin's rule had been 34.7 million tonnes, in 1952. No large foreign purchases were made during that time, despite the fact that in 1945 and 1946 there was near-famine in many regions. (For instance, the Interior Commissar of the Tatar Republic, Gorbulin, reported to Beria that 46,000 people were suffering from malnutrition and needed help.³⁴) Under Stalin, the only grain that came from abroad was a certain amount sent by the USA at the end of the Second World War. Stalin had other ways of maximizing the grain supply. In July 1947 he received a report that ‘22,678 people had been put on trial for the theft, wasting and spoiling of grain’. They were chiefly collective farm managers, managers of collecting points and elevators. ‘A particularly large number of thefts took place and evidence of waste was discovered in Ukraine. In July alone the Ukrainian Ministry of the Interior put 10,511 people on trial.’³⁵ In effect, this was one way of covering up the shortage of grain: arrests, keeping quiet about the problem, and strict rationing.

After 1953, less grain was produced than was consumed in eighteen of the twenty-four years to 1977, the shortfall being covered by huge foreign purchases, at the cost of the national reserves. In 1975, for instance, 50.2 million tonnes were produced, while consumption amounted to 89.4 million tonnes.³⁶

On 16 October 1978 the Minister of State Procurement, G.S. Zolotukhin, submitted a report to Leonid Brezhnev exposing the entire sorry picture of grain supply from 1940 to 1977. Brezhnev read the report, which was nothing less than a condemnation of the whole Bolshevik farm system, and simply signed it. Either he did not understand it, or he was used to reading about such failures.

Stalin had no intention of selling his large gold reserves for grain, because it was a matter of indifference to him if half the population died of starvation: he would never bend his knee to the capitalists. In 1953, moreover, there were millions of slave labourers in the GULAG: Soviet gold was stained with the blood of Soviet prisoners whose lives had been trampled in the frozen wastes of Kolyma. Considering the vast consumption of the country's reserves, whether in material or human resources, it is not surprising that all the figures cited above were hidden away as top state secrets. They were indeed an indictment of the system, and of ‘Lenin's cooperative plan’.

When on 8 November 1917 (New Style) Lenin reported on the land and his decree on land to the Second Congress of Soviets, he stated that the question ‘can be determined only by the Constituent Assembly’. He was compelled to declare that ‘until the great land changes have been carried out, until their final solution by the Constituent Assembly, the following peasant mandate, compiled on the basis of 242 local peasant mandates, must apply’.³⁷ He then proceeded to list the eight points of this decree, which included abolition of the right to own land privately. Land was to become national property, to be distributed by local and central government, and the land fund would be subject to periodic repartition, according to the growth of the population. There were disapproving noises in the hall. Lenin faltered, but then retorted: ‘It is being said here that both the decree and the mandate were composed by the Socialist Revolutionaries. So what? What does it matter who composed it, but we as a democratic government cannot ignore a decree that has come up from the grass roots.’³⁸

Lenin could scarcely conceal his dissatisfaction that the SR programme, while socialist in essence, said nothing about the dictatorship of the proletariat, and put the land problem in the context of the traditional peasant commune. The SRs saw the state as an auxiliary element. Lenin would speak his mind on the subject at the Third Congress of Soviets, where, admittedly, he was also compelled to say that the union of Bolsheviks and Left SRs ‘had been created on a firm base and is getting stronger, not by the day, but by the hour’.³⁹ He nevertheless made it plain that the peasants must understand clearly that ‘there is no other path to socialism than by the dictatorship of the proletariat and the ruthless suppression of the supremacy of the exploiters’.⁴⁰ Having just thrown off one halter, the peasants were now going to have to put on another, a proletarian, or rather Bolshevik, one.

In the final analysis, it was their attitude to the peasants that led the Bolsheviks into a blind alley. In one of his last works, ‘On Cooperatives’, Lenin defined his concept of bringing the peasants to socialism. The article contains some valid propositions and sensible ideas, for example, that the NEP was a way of combining private and general interest, or that cooperative agriculture was a gradual affair that would take one or two decades. Lenin also talked of the need for a cultural revolution. He devalued all of these ideas, however, by stressing his old Jacobin motives: ‘securing the proletariat's leadership of the peasantry’, ‘the ownership of the means of production to be in the hands of the state’, and so on. In effect, he abandoned common sense when he asserted that it was vulgar and fantastic to imagine that ‘by simple cooperativism we can convert our class enemies into class collaborators and the class war into … so-called civil peace’.⁴¹

All the good intentions of the revolutionaries foundered as soon as the Bolsheviks started singing their favourite tune about class war, the dictatorship of the proletariat, coercion in the village. They left no room for political and economic freedom, the voluntary principle or age-old traditions of non-Bolshevik communal life. Lenin revealed his approach to the peasant question most completely during the civil war. In effect his policy was one of decimating the peasants, of igniting civil war in the villages. Not even the worst food shortages could justify Lenin's cruelty towards the most productive element among the peasants. He always spoke the word ‘kulak’ with seething hatred. Yet, had he not sold the family estate at Alakaevka, he would have been among the first to suffer ‘dekulakization’.

In May 1918 Lenin wrote the fundamental points of his decree on food. He demanded that the decree include ideas on ‘the ruthless and terroristic struggle and war against the peasant and other bourgeoisie who are holding back surpluses’. He insisted on ‘making it clearer that grain owners, who have surpluses and are not bringing them to stations and places of collection and loading, must be declared enemies of the people and subject to a prison term of not less than ten years, with confiscation of all their property and permanent expulsion from the commune’.⁴²He wrote of those he called kulaks with open hatred: ‘Sated and self-satisfied, their money-boxes stuffed with huge amounts which they made out of the state during the war, the peasant bourgeoisie is obstinately deaf and indifferent to the cries of the starving workers and peasant poor … We must put an end to the obstinacy of greedy village kulaks—peasant predators—and the well-off.’⁴³ It might have seemed that this element ought to have been preserved in order to support and help the poor, whether by economic, financial, fiscal or other means. Why reduce them to the level of the poorest? Because that would have undermined Lenin's dictatorship of the proletariat and class war. He made that clear at the Third Congress of Soviets when he said: ‘To imagine that the socialists are going to serve up socialism on a plate, all dressed up, is wrong, it isn't going to happen. No question of the class war has yet been resolved in history other than by force. Force, in the form it issues from the toiling, exploited masses against the exploiters, yes, we are for such force!’ (Stormy applause.)⁴⁴

It was in the war waged against the kulaks that Lenin introduced the term ‘enemy of the people’, created the taking of hostages, organized penal units in the army and concentration camps. He was, in Victor Chernov's words, ‘a virtual Robespierre’.⁴⁵ Continually calling for ‘shooting on the spot’,⁴⁶ he would make it lawful to give half the value of grain found as a reward for revealing the existence of a surplus, or simply for informing on one's neighbour.⁴⁷

The full weight of the Bolshevik experiment fell on the peasants, above all the better-off peasants. The countryside responded at first by silent mass resistance, and then numerous uprisings which were ruthlessly drowned in blood. Raids on villages by food detachments became routine, leading to the famine of 1921-1922. A particularly big uprising—there were many others—was that in Tambov, which began in August 1921. Moscow had to use large forces and, as we have seen, poison gas to suppress it.

Curiously, Lenin was more restrained in relation to the Allied intervention, and even to the White leaders Kolchak, Denikin and Wrangel, than he was towards the peasants or the Cossacks, towards whom he became maniacally ruthless in his use of unbridled violence. For instance, on 11 June 1921 the following order was issued with the approval of the Politburo:

Antonov's band [in Tambov] has been smashed by the decisive action of our troops, it has been scattered and is being captured piecemeal. In order finally to tear out all the SR-bandit roots … the All-Union Executive Committee orders as follows: 1. Citizens who refuse to give their names are to be shot on the spot without trial; 2. The penalty of hostage-taking should be announced and they are to be shot when arms are not surrendered. 3. In the event of concealed arms being found, shoot the eldest worker in the family on the spot and without trial. 4. Any family which harboured a bandit is subject to arrest and deportation from the province, their property to be confiscated and the eldest worker in the family to be shot without trial. 5. The eldest worker of any families hiding members of the family or the property of bandits is to be shot on the spot without trial. 6. If a bandit's family flees, the property is to be distributed among peasants loyal to the Soviet regime and the abandoned houses burnt or demolished. 7. This order is to be carried out strictly and mercilessly. It is to be read at village meetings.⁴⁸

The Politburo fully approved the massacre that was being conducted in the provinces. Only rarely did it register a faint voice of protest. In September 1921 Vera Figner,* head of the Moscow Committee of the Red Cross, wrote to the Revolutionary Tribunal of the Republic:

There are at present in Moscow detention centres a large number of peasants from Tambov province, expelled … as hostages for their relatives before the liquidation of Antonov's bands. There are fifty-six people in Novo-Peskov camp, thirteen in Semenov, 295 in Kozhukhov, including twenty-nine men aged over sixty, 158 young people under the age of seventeen, and forty-seven under ten years old, and five not yet one year old. They all arrived in Moscow in pitiful condition, ragged, half-naked and so hungry that the small children are rooting in rubbish dumps to find a scrap to eat … The Political Red Cross is petitioning for the relief of these hostages and for their return home to their villages.⁴⁹

The regime was utterly deaf to such pleas.

In May 1921 Tukhachevsky had at his disposal more than 50,000 regular troops, three armoured trains, three armoured units, several mobile machine-gun units, about seventy field guns, hundreds of machine-guns and an aircraft unit. In the event of resistance, the troops would burn whole villages, firing point-blank into the peasants' huts and taking no prisoners. After his defeat, Antonov tried again to revive resistance, and continued for several months to keep the Bolsheviks busy. In May 1922, however, he was betrayed to the Cheka, and was trapped in a hut with his brother a month later. They held out for an about hour, but when the army set fire to the hut they made a break for the forest and were shot down as they ran. Many executions followed, as the army took its revenge on those suspected of having helped Antonov.

Less widespread uprisings than that led by Antonov had been flaring in many provinces. In 1921 the Red Army lost 171,185 men in internal disorders, not including troops of the Cheka or Special Purpose units. In the course of 1921-22 a war situation existed in thirty-six provinces.⁵⁰

The ruined countryside was incapable of feeding the population. Famine was beginning to break out in many provinces, and the workers in the towns were receiving a miserable ration of bread. Yet the government continued to sell grain abroad. At the end of 1920, for instance, the Foreign Commissariat suggested that ‘a second shipment of grain be sent to Italy’. The Central Committee decided ‘to acknowledge that it was politically necessary to give Italy a further quantity of grain. The precise amount and conditions of the delivery are to be worked out by the Food Commission and Foreign Trade Commissariat.’⁵¹

Thirty-six million people were starving, thousands dying every day, and yet on 7 December 1922 the Politburo under Lenin's chairmanship took the decision to export almost a million tonnes of grain.⁵² As Berdyaev put it: ‘There is something other-worldly in the Bolsheviks, something alien. That is what makes them terrifying.’⁵³ The country was starving, the civilized world was sending food aid to Russia, and yet the government was selling vast quantities of grain abroad.

The famine grew. In the summer of 1921, the US government had decided to send help to the starving through its American Relief Administration, headed by Herbert Hoover. The quantities of aid were huge, and the feeding programme continued until the summer of 1923, supporting no less than twenty-five million people in the Volga region alone. The lives of millions of Soviet citizens were saved. Yet while the American Relief Administration was bringing aid, the Politburo was requisitioning valuables from the middle classes, robbing the churches and using tsarist gold reserves, ostensibly to purchase grain from abroad, but in reality to finance revolution throughout the world and to force the creation of more and more new Communist Parties. On 15 October 1921, it decreed that ‘not one expenditure of the gold reserve may be undertaken without a special order of the Politburo’.⁵⁴ The number of agents abroad towhom very large sums of money in local denominations were sent—virtually from the moment the Bolsheviks took power—is countless. A typical monthly statement begins with Hungary and continues with Czechoslovakia, Germany, Italy, America (including US$1.008m for John Reed), England, the Balkans, Sweden and Switzerland. Such allocations went on month after month.⁵⁵

Meanwhile, Lenin seemed to view the international aid organizations more as ‘intrigues of the imperialist bourgeoisie’ than humanitarian agencies. A note in his own hand to Molotov, dated 23 August 1921, reads: ‘Comrade Molotov, in view of the agreement with the American, Hoover, there is going to be an influx of a mass of Americans. We should think about surveillance and being kept informed. I propose the Politburo order that a commission be created with the task of preparing, working out and operating intensified surveillance and information on the foreigners, through the Cheka and other organs. The Commission should consist of Molotov, Unshlikht and Chicherin.’⁵⁶ The very next day, the appropriate orders were issued.

Many documents, signed by Stalin, Trotsky and Kamenev, show that obstacles were deliberately placed in the path of the Americans, such as limiting the quantity of food to be distributed to private citizens and organizations, and imposing cash levies for the use of Russian roads and warehouses.⁵⁷ The Bolsheviks seemed incapable of understanding the humanitarian motives of foreigners. The Americans were ‘bourgeois’, and nothing good could be expected of them.

The SRs, who were regarded as the defenders of the peasants' interests, bitterly criticized the Bolsheviks. In 1921 their Central Committee published an underground pamphlet entitled ‘What Have the Bolsheviks Given the People?’ It stated:

From the start of their accursed empire the Bolsheviks have shown themselves to be enemies of the peasants. They sent armed detachments into the countryside to get grain … The peasant cannot breathe freely: it's either confiscations or loading duties, or tree-cutting or the army, and bring your carts with you, or bring your last livestock for slaughter. There are ninety million peasants in Russia, that is, the huge majority. But what part do they have in running the state?⁵⁸

The SRs, however, could do nothing. The liquidation of the uprisings meant also the liquidation of the SR Party. The Bolsheviks, having formally reconciled themselves to the SR agrarian programme and virtually taken it over, never accepted its central point, that the land was the property of the commune. The Bolsheviks regarded the land as the property of the state alone, and indeed their Land Code stated this plainly. As for the peasants, they would become merely a living appendage of the state's property. The ground for collectivization was being prepared. By making the peasant and the commune into state property, Lenin was preparing them for a new form of social enslavement, one based on ‘socialist principles’. The New Economic Policy was no more than a chance for a few last gasps of freedom before the peasants were incarcerated into the collective farm system of virtual serfdom, where their daily lives and their working practices were controlled, not by the demands of agrarian production, but by the dictates of the Communist Party.

The coming collectivization began according to methods essentially formulated by Lenin. Force was both permissible and inevitable. It was to be cooperative agriculture, but under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin was able to take over the countryside chiefly because the Bolsheviks managed to ignite conflict between the peasants themselves, by setting the landless, the weak and the indolent against the well-off. They also took the civil war into the villages, and at the cost of millions of lives pacified the countryside and set it ‘on a new path’. Speaking at a combined plenum of the Central Committee and Party Control Commission on 7 January 1933 about the achievement of the Five-Year Plan in agriculture in four years, Stalin invoked Lenin:

Lenin said that ‘If we go on in the old way with small farms, even if we're free citizens on free land, we shall still face inevitable disaster.’ Lenin said that ‘Only with the help of common … comradely labour can we get out of the crisis which the imperialist war put us in.’ Lenin said that ‘It is essential to go over to general cultivation in large model farms; without this we won't get out of the disorder, out of the frankly desperate position Russia is in.’⁵⁹

He declared that the Five-Year Plan for agriculture had been over-fulfilled three times, and also revealed what Bolshevik logic ought to have meant keeping a state secret: ‘The Party has managed to ensure that, instead of the [eight-ten million tonnes] of marketable grain produced during the period of individual farming, we now have the possibility of delivering [ten-twenty million tonnes] of marketable grain annually.’⁶⁰ Why, if this was true, should the country be starving? The fact is that the collectives were useful to the state because it could choose to take all the grain, if it wished, and at a symbolic price. It was only a matter of giving the order. This ‘Leninist’ form of management became a unique way of acquiring all the surplus product—and often more—at no cost. Stalin explained that the main aim of the rural Communists must be ‘to drive the grain procurement campaign all-out’. The only obstacles were the ‘peasant predators’, as Lenin had described the kulaks, who had been ‘smashed’, Stalin said, ‘but not yet finished off’.⁶¹ That, however, would be a simple matter, he concluded, ‘for we are in power, we dispose of the state's resources, it's up to us to run the kolkhozes, and we must bear all the responsibility for the work in the countryside’.⁶²

Even as Stalin was giving this speech on the kolkhoz, the kulaks were being ‘finished off’. On 16 January 1933 he approved a proposal from Kaganovich and Balitsky to deport five hundred kulak families from Odessa province;⁶³ on the same day he signed a proposal from Kosior to evict three hundred kulak families from Chernigov. Similar orders dealt with seven hundred families in Dnepropetrovsk and four hundred from Kharkov;⁶⁴ a thousand families of ‘malicious peasant farmers’ from Bashkiria, three to four hundred ‘of the most malicious saboteurs’ from the Lower Volga, and in addition to 30,000 kulaks from Northern Caucasus, another four hundred families to be deported to concentration camps in the north of Russia.⁶⁵ Any Communists who had been expelled from the Party for sabotage of grain supplies were to be sent to the north ‘like the kulaks’.⁶⁶ The documents show that the Politburo ordered the resettlement of another one million people to the northern territories of Siberia. The only requests that came from the local authorities were for more GPU troops and for the right to apply the death penalty at their own discretion.⁶⁷

Responding to Shevardnadze's unease in 1987 about the term ‘liquidating the kulaks’, Gorbachev declared: ‘The liquidation of the kulaks as a class was the correct policy. Why change the words? That's what happened. What we cannot agree with are the things done during dekulakization. The competition [between activists] and the forced pace of the collectivization meant that a large number of middle peasants were affected. These were different things. But as far as the kulaks were concerned, it was the correct policy.’⁶⁸ The words of a reformer who, it seemed, had yet to free himself of Leninist dogmatism.

It was the peasants who suffered most in both the civil war and the ‘socialist transformations’. Lenin's slogans were utterly incomprehensible to them, but it was also they who were most often sent to the front, who had the most requisitioned and taken from them, who were the most arrested and exiled group of all. The Bolsheviks appeared to be alarmed by the thought of the least improvement in village life. Any sign of wealth was taken as a tendency towards the ‘bourgeoisification’ of the countryside, an increase in the number of kulaks. Dogma deprived the Bolsheviks of common sense. Preobrazhensky, for instance, asserted that middle peasants were turning to individual farming as a way of raising productivity, but that this was the path to kulakism. He could not have made it plainer that productivity and the creation of wealth in the countryside was emphatically not the Bolshevik purpose for the peasants.

At the same time, the Bolsheviks saw the peasants as the source of funding for industrialization, a fact which Lenin's successors did not conceal. On 9 July 1928 Stalin addressed a Central Committee plenum: the peasant, he said, ‘is paying the state not only the usual direct and indirect taxes, but he is also over-paying through relatively high prices for industrial goods, that's first; and on the whole he receives less for his agricultural produce, that's second. This is an additional tax on the peasantry in the interest of raising industry. It is a sort of “tribute”, a super-tax.’⁶⁹

Invoking Lenin as an ally, Stalin spoke of the need ‘to apply extreme measures’ in the villages. He called the kolkhoz revolution ‘the most profound revolutionary change, equal in its consequences to the revolutionary change in October 1917’.⁷⁰ In carrying out this ‘kolkhoz revolution’, i.e. collectivization, Stalin created a state of emergency throughout the country which was to last several years—he had learned from Lenin that a crisis called for radical measures. In the spring of 1918, for instance, when grain supplies ceased to arrive from German-occupied Ukraine, Lenin had proposed converting the War Commissariat into a War Produce Commissariat, ‘to concentrate nine tenths of the work of the War Commissariat on preparing the army for a war for grain and for fighting that war’. He proposed that breaches of discipline in such a war should be punished by execution. ‘Food detachments must be formed and sent to the war for grain.’⁷¹

When the time came, Stalin, too, gave the signal for a war in the countryside. On 27 December 1929, at a conference of Marxist agronomists, he declared: ‘We have moved from a policy of limiting the kulaks' exploitative tendencies to a policy of liquidating the kulaks as a class.’⁷² And yet only two years before he made this speech, the kulaks had produced more than eleven million tonnes of grain, almost eight times as much as that produced by the state and collective farms. However, kulak grain had to be purchased, whereas it could simply be taken from the kolkhoz.

At the time of this speech, Stalin was preparing documents for the Politburo which included a directive ‘on methods for the liquidation of kulak farms in districts of total collectivization’. It was a lengthy and detailed document, the implementation of which would put an end once and for all to the most productive and hardworking part of the Russian peasantry. Stalin personally wrote a treatise on the urgency of these measures.

The Politburo defined three categories in its policy on the kulaks: ‘a) First category: counter-revolutionary kulak activists are to be liquidated at once by means of imprisonment in concentration camps, using the death penalty if necessary; b) Second category: the remaining activists … who are to be deported to remote regions of the USSR; c) Any kulaks left over.’ The directive gave the OGPU a schedule of numbers to be deported to the north and east of the country, depending on their place of origin, but since only the heads of families were counted, the real figures would have been between five and seven times those shown:

Place of origin	Camp	Exile
Middle Volga	3-4,000	8-10,000
Northern
Caucasus	6-8,000	20,000
Ukraine	15,000	30-35,000
Black Earth
region	3-5,000	10-15,000
Lower Volga	4-6,000	10-12,000
Belorussia	4-5,000	6-7,000
Urals	4-5,000	10-15,000
Kazakhstan	5-6,000	10-15,000

As far as remaining oblasts [provinces] and republics are concerned, the OGPU should apply an analogous schedule in agreement with the corresponding local Party secretaries and the Central Committee. Uninhabited or under-inhabited locations should be selected for exile … Deported kulaks should be distributed in these localities in small settlements to be run by a commandant. [Land] confiscated from kulaks is to become part of the indivisible assets of collective farms … For the duration of the campaign the OGPU shall have full powers of extra-judicial handling of affairs.⁷³

According to this schedule, nearly two million men, women and children would have been affected. But taking into account other similar data, my own reckoning is that between eight and a half and nine million were thus ‘dekulakized’. About a quarter of them died within a few months, and another quarter within a year.

The version of this horrible business that Stalin gave to Churchill, during the latter's visit to Moscow in August 1942, paints a very different picture: ‘It was fearful. Four years it lasted. It was absolutely necessary for Russia, if we were to avoid periodic famines, to plough the land with tractors … Many peasants agreed to come in with us … Some of them were given land of their own to cultivate in the province of Tomsk or the province of Irkutsk or farther north, but the great bulk were very unpopular and were wiped out by their batraks [i.e. the poorest peasants].’⁷⁴ A large part of the population—and not only Bolsheviks—believed that this drastic measure would solve many problems in one fell swoop. Such was the monstrous price paid for Stalin's plan to ‘introduce socialism into the countryside’. The peasants were made into a semi-slave ‘socialist’ estate, while the more professional, active and efficient part of the rural population—Lenin's ‘peasant predators’—were liquidated.

Already debilitated by the confiscations and other hardships imposed by the regime, the peasants were in no condition to resist. Yet there were outbursts here and there. In response to one in Dagestan, Stalin told the Politburo, ‘it would be sensible to carry out the gradual liquidation of the disturbances by isolating the region from the outside world and taking it apart from within. Yagoda must be told to order the OGPU to demand the surrender of the chiefs.’⁷⁵ As in Tambov and elsewhere, so here the affair ended in arrests, exile and prison camp.

The peasants were finally crushed by the famine that struck them in the closing stage of collectivization. The state, as we have seen, was now able to extract every last ear of grain, including seed-grain. In 1932 the harvest was less than in previous years, but the state took virtually the same amount as before from the collectives, using all available means. The Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party kept a blacklist of villages that were ‘maliciously sabotaging grain procurements’. Six such villages were named on 6 December 1932 alone,⁷⁶ and once a village was named it could expect punishment to follow: sale of its produce prohibited, deliveries to the farm halted, immediate payment of credits and, of course, a visit from units of the OGPU to ‘cleanse the kolkhoz of alien and hostile elements’.

In 1932-33 Ukraine, the Central Black Earth region, the Kuban, the Northern Caucasus, the Volga region and Kazakhstan were gripped by famine. Meanwhile, kulaks and ‘hostile elements’ continued to be removed in order to settle the White Sea—Baltic Canal zone, as well as new sites in Siberia and the north.⁷⁷ In places the famine was worse than during the civil war. Thousands tried to flee to the towns, but the roads and railway stations were blocked by Chekists. Also, in December 1932 the regime had imposed another restriction: peasants were deprived of their identity papers, without which they were finally made into Soviet serfs.

The peasants and their children were reduced to eating grass, nettles and the stubble left after harvesting. The state, however, was keeping a watchful eye, and on 7 August 1932 an order, known to the population as ‘the stubble law’, was issued, according to which: ‘For the misappropriation (theft) of kolkhoz and cooperative property, the highest form of social defence is to be applied as a measure of judicial repression, namely execution, with confiscation of all property or not less than ten years' loss of liberty and confiscation of property in mitigating circumstances.’⁷⁸ Taking stubble was not usually a shooting offence, but several thousand peasants were given ten years. Apart from the tens of thousands of peasants who were despatched to the camps, another three and a half million starved to death. Meanwhile, grain was being sold abroad by the hundreds of tonnes.

Yet Stalin, the chief organizer of Lenin's ‘cooperative plan’, remained confident. The propaganda machine was working at full blast. At the height of the famine, in February 1933, a congress of 1500 kolkhoz shock-workers, loyal to the OGPU, was convened. Speeches were given by Molotov, Kaganovich, Kalinin and Voroshilov, as well as Red Cavalry commander Budenny. The main speech was given by Stalin on 19 February. He mentioned the famine only indirectly. Noting that his comrades had said that the workers had achieved far more than the kolkhozniks, he went on: ‘But you know what these achievements cost the workers of Leningrad and Moscow, what privation they suffered.’ There had been times, he said, when the workers got only ‘two ounces of black bread, half of it husks. And that went on not for a month or half a year, but for two whole years.’⁷⁹ By his demeanour Stalin made it plain that he regarded such privation as the norm, even necessary and inevitable. The workers had stuck it out, but that was as far as he would go in mentioning the famine.

The famine was incidental. The important thing was that the shock-workers should remember their duty: ‘You are only asked to do one thing, and that is to work honestly, divide the kolkhoz income according to the work done, protect the kolkhoz goods, take care of the tractors and machines, see the horses are well looked after, carry out the tasks of your workers' and peasants' state, strengthen the kolkhoz and throw out any kulaks and their henchmen who might have got in.’⁸⁰

While the congress was in session, regional Party secretaries in Ukraine were attempting to do something to help the thousands of starving people. The Kiev regional Party secretary ordered that ‘all people, children and adults alike, who are swollen or prostrate from starvation’ must be got on their feet by 5 March, and he transferred them to special accommodation and arranged restorative feeding. At the same time, ‘kolkhoz funds are not to be squandered on pain of severe punishment’. On the basis of his orders from Moscow, this official saw the cause of the famine as ‘abuses in the kolkhozes, idling, a fall in labour discipline and so on’.⁸¹ With such contradictory orders, famine was being manufactured in Ukraine, the land of plenty.

Lenin said that ‘the simple growth of cooperative farming is the same for us … as the growth of socialism’,⁸² and Stalin called the kolkhoz the most acceptable form of cooperative farming. It was, after all, able to destroy the peasant commune and turn its inhabitants into state serfs, and the Communist system tried with amazing persistence to make the obligatory labour of the kolkhoz the equivalent of free labour. But however many ‘historic’ Central Committee plenums were held, however much investment and technology was sent to the villages, or stratagems employed to make the kolkhoz managers happy, the desired result was never achieved.

The country which before the revolution had been the world's fourth largest exporter of grain had become a major importer. This alone was a condemnation of the Bolshevik experiment. Stalin would not of course buy grain from abroad: the death of millions of his citizens from starvation was no more than an incident along the great path to the shining future. Khrushchev and his successors became big buyers of grain, but every year they had to rack their brains wondering what they could sell for the necessary hard currency, on top of the two to three hundred tonnes of gold they sold annually. Only once did Brezhnev ask for a report on the supply and consumption of grain over an extended period. It came stamped ‘Especially Important’ and was at once tucked away in a ‘special file’. In two pages, and with merciless clarity, it revealed a huge Party secret: throughout the whole Soviet period, the country had suffered a shortage of grain in practically every year.⁸³ The situation had been dealt with in two ways: under Stalin the people had starved, and after him the government had bought grain from the capitalists who, contrary to Lenin's prophecy, had not suffered a ‘collapse’.

Brezhnev pondered the two pages for a long time. Did this mean the collective system could not feed the country? Lenin's intention to liquidate the ‘peasant predators’ had long been fulfilled, yet still there wasn't enough grain. And the Soviet Union had been buying it every year from the capitalists. What about socialist competition? The virgin lands? The millions of medals given away? Only recently he had received a proposal from Kiev to create a new one, ‘Hero of Communist Labour’, with himself as the first recipient, of course. Since 1957, the country had been buying and buying abroad. Hundreds, thousands of tonnes of gold, oil, gas, metal—all for grain.

Normally Brezhnev marked files ‘For circulation’, i.e. to the rest of the Politburo. This time, he managed only to sign his name and add the date, 17 October 1978. He did not want to discuss the issue at the Politburo. What good would it do for such information to leak beyond the Kremlin walls? No one else needed to see it. He put it aside and set about signing a thick pile of orders giving decorations to the victors of socialist competition in honour of the Great October Revolution.

The Tragedy of the Intelligentsia

Lenin was both a demon of destruction and a demiurge of creation. He wanted to ‘introduce’ socialism in a few months, and to ‘build’ communism in a few years. His ideas were radical and impulsive. At his suggestion, on 12 April 1918 the Sovnarkom approved a decree ‘to remove monuments erected in honour of the tsars and their servants and to prepare plans for monuments to the Russian socialist revolution’. It was expected that models would be ready by 1 May. It proved, however, much easier to remove the tsars and their servants from their pedestals than to replace them with new idols. At the end of July Academician Pokrovsky presented a report to the Sovnarkom in which he called for the erection of ‘fifty monuments in the field of revolutionary and social activity, in philosophy, literature and art’. Lenin proposed that lists of candidates be presented to the Sovnarkom ‘in five days' time’.

A report was sent to Lunacharsky, expressing ‘the desirability of urgently fulfilling the Sovnarkom order to embellish the streets, public buildings and so on with inscriptions and quotations’. Two days later the list was approved. Two months later Lenin wanted to know how far the Sovnarkom's order had been implemented, and he was extremely dissatisfied with the response. Almost nothing had been done. He called Lunacharsky, discovered he was in Petrograd, and cabled him at once: ‘I heard Vinogradov's report today on busts and monuments, and I am indignant to the bottom of my soul; nothing's been done in months; up to now not a single bust. There's no bust of Marx for the street, nothing's been done to make propaganda inscriptions on the streets. I'm admonishing you for your criminal and negligent attitude, I demand you send me the names of all the responsible people to be put on trial. Shame on the saboteurs and scatter-brains.’⁸⁴

With the country in ruins, the people starving, widespread crime and social chaos, Lenin wanted to discard the old as quickly as possibleand inspire the crucified population with new cast-iron idols. He seemed not to understand that nothing disappears in history, and try as he might to obliterate the memory of, for example, ‘the idiot Nicholas II’, seventy-five years later the tsar would overtake Lenin in popularity, and that thanks to the Bolsheviks' own efforts. Memory and public awareness function according to their own laws, not those of a Politburo or Sovnarkom.

The episode of the monuments serves to illustrate that Lenin regarded the country's spiritual culture in strictly pragmatic terms: everything must serve the revolution, and to this end revolutionary education and agitation stood at the head of the list.

Replying to a questionnaire from the Institute of the Brain in 1935, Krupskaya remarked: ‘He [Lenin] loved the theatre very much, it always made a strong impression on him.’⁸⁵ This assertion was, however, at odds with other reminiscences she had previously produced, in which she had noted that while they were living abroad before the revolution, ‘we'd go to the theatre and leave after the first act’. Lenin went to the theatre only rarely in Moscow, and Krupskaya recalled that, in the middle of a dramatized version of Dickens's The Cricket on the Hearth, he became bored and left early. His ‘love’ for the theatre did not prevent him from agreeing to close the Bolshoi Theatre. The Politburo discussed this issue on several occasions, and was in favour.⁸⁶ Lunacharsky protested even before the question came to the Sovnarkom, but Lenin was insistent. He wrote to Molotov:

Having heard from Kamenev that the Sovnarkom has unanimously accepted Lunacharsky's obscene proposal to save the Bolshoi opera and ballet, I propose the Politburo issue the following orders: 1. The Presidium of VTsIK must rescind the Sovnarkom order; 2. Keep just a few dozen artistes for Moscow and Peter[sburg] to perform (as singers and dancers) on a self-financing basis, that is, avoid any large expenditure on scenery, etc.; 3. Give not less than half the billions thus saved for the liquidation of illiteracy and for reading rooms; 4. Summon Lunacharsky for a five-minute hearing of the accused's last words and to be reprimanded.⁸⁷

This last remark confirms Lenin's tendency to humour and indulge the cosmopolitan Lunacharsky, but the burden of the message was plain. Who would oppose a campaign against illiteracy, but at the price of the Bolshoi and other great repositories of national culture? Lenin was unconcerned: a lowering of the nation's intellect would be the price for raising the general population's awareness to a standard that would make it easier to rule them.

In December 1918 Lenin personally wrote an instruction:

The task: within two weeks to compose a book for peasants and workers to read … Themes: the building of the Soviet regime, its domestic and foreign policies. For example, what is the Soviet regime? How is the country governed? The law on land. The Economic Councils. The nationalization of the factories. Labour discipline. Imperialism. The imperialist war. The secret treaties. How we proposed peace. What we are fighting for now? What is Communism? The separation of church and state. And so on.⁸⁸

Even the campaign against illiteracy was politicized. Nothing was to be said about the past, as if it had been confiscated and consigned to the scrapheap. The workers and peasants must know above all else what Communism was. As someone with a powerful intellect of his own, Lenin knew that the mind was the strongest of bastions. It would not be easily captured, even with the help of the OGPU. It would be necessary to mobilize the Party and the small section of the intelligentsia which had accepted Bolshevism. Lenin's general line was therefore to bring the intelligentsia under Party control, and make them work for the revolution. When the Politburo discussed the question of the Proletcult* congress, Lenin, Stalin, Kamenev, Krestinsky and Bukharin unanimously advocated ‘the subordination of Proletcult to the Party’.⁸⁹

Trotsky, who was more deeply involved in literature and art than were the other leaders, told Moscow writers and poets in 1925: ‘We have a factory for creating new proletarian poets and artists, but it is not any MAPP or VAPP, it is the RKP^†  … The Comrades should sit in the Party and study. The Party educates the proletarian poet, it creates the genuinely artistic writer. Therefore the Communist writer, as a member of the Party, must concentrate his attention on creativity within his Party.’⁹⁰

The tragedy of Russian culture and the intelligentsia was on its way. Their Party-mindedness would deprive them of creative freedom. The mind is not only a fortress, it is also the last oasis of freedom. In order to form a nation capable of thought at an elementary level, the Bolsheviks fed the people a generous diet of primitive intellectual nourishment. The field of literature banned to Soviet readers widened to absurd proportions over the next seventy years. The education of the Soviet intelligentsia would be one of the Bolsheviks' chief tasks, and the programme for it was devised in an article Lenin had written as early as 1905, entitled ‘The Party Organization and Party Literature’. This made it plain that literature must be the business of the Party, that newspapers must be under the control of Party organizations, and that writers must be Party members.⁹¹ Once Lenin was in power, this view was made into a policy.

First, the intellectuals had to be screened. Those—perhaps the majority—who were incapable of responding to the demands of the revolution, became exiles. Many paid with their lives, or fled abroad, or were driven there, as were tens of thousands of the best of them. In June 1922 the Politburo discussed a report on ‘anti-Soviet groupings’ by Iosif Unshlikht, Dzerzhinsky's top aide, which proposed that those who thought differently from the Party should be deprived of their homeland. The report proposed the formation of a special commission, consisting of representatives of the NKVD and Justice Commissariat, which would have the right, when there was no possibility of resorting to stronger measures, of commuting such measures to exile abroad or to defined places in the Russian Federation.⁹²

The omnipotent GPU set about singling out those it regarded as a danger to the revolution, in practice the élite of Russian society. On 2 August Unshlikht was already able to report to Stalin with a list of ‘the anti-Soviet intelligentsia of Moscow … and Petrograd. All notable individuals will be arrested and offered the chance to leave the country at their own expense. If they refuse, the GPU will pay.’ At the same time, the ‘counter-revolutionary newspapers Agricultural News, Thought and Economic Rebirthwill be closed for publishing anti-Soviet and idealistic views’.⁹³

The GPU evidently knew its business: the names it selected were the brightest of the Russian intellectual élite, but it was also guided in its choices by Lenin's personal intervention, for the policy of draining society of its best intellectual resources was very much his. The lists were submitted to him several times for corrections, additions, remarks and questions, before going on to the GPU, to Dzerzhinsky, Stalin and Unshlikht for completion. Even when the first contingent was ready for deportation, in the autumn of 1922, when Lenin was recovering from illness, he was still concerned about similar such events in the future. On 17 September 1922 he wrote to Unshlikht: ‘Please be so kind as to arrange for all the documents to be sent back to me with comments as to whohas been deported, who is in prison, who has been excused deportation and why. Make short comments on this letter.’⁹⁴ The following night, Unshlikht being away, his deputy, Yagoda, replied: ‘In accordance with your instructions I enclose your lists with comments on them, and the names of people (listed separately) who have remained in Moscow or [Petrograd] for one reason or another.’ He added that ‘the first contingent leaves Moscow on Friday 22 September’.⁹⁵

Lenin's lists were extensive, and bore such sub-headings as: Professors of 1st Moscow University; Professors of Petrovsko-Razumovsky Agricultural Academy; Professors of Institute of Railway Engineers; [those involved in] the case of the Free Economic Society; anti-Soviet professors of the Archaeological Institute; anti-Soviet figures connected with Bereg publishing house; people involved in case no. 813 (Abrikosov group); anti-Soviet agronomists and cooperativists; physicians; anti-Soviet engineers; writers; Petrograd writers; and a special list of Petrograd anti-Soviet intellectuals.

The first contingent numbered 120 people. The document ordering their expulsion was first signed on 31 July 1922 by Kamenev, Kursky and Unshlikht. Following the list of distinguished names came a comment by Yagoda: ‘According to a decision of the Politburo, the Commission chaired by Comrade Dzerzhinsky examined petitions to cancel the deportation of individuals considered irreplaceable in their fields and for whom the appropriate institution had requested permission to remain at their posts.’ As an example of the sort of comment made by the GPU, the entry on the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev reads: ‘He is close to Bereg publishing house, has been investigated in connection with the tactical centre, monarchist, right-wing Kadet, Black Hundredist [ultra-right-wing], religious, involved in church counter-revolution. Exile.’⁹⁶

It is worth noting that Lenin was making these decisions only a month after Krupskaya had been helping him to do the simplest mental exercises, such as double-figure multiplication. He had covered a twenty-one-page notepad with childlike scrawls in the process.⁹⁷ The future of an entire generation of the flower of the Russian intelligentsia was being decided by a man who could barely cope with an arithmetical problem for a seven-year-old. No mention of this police activity is to be found in the official twelve-volume chronicle of Lenin's life, which only depicts the sunny side of his life. On the day he was going through the lists for deportation, according to the Chronicle, he ordered ‘envelopes and best quality glue’.⁹⁸

Two days earlier, on 15 September, Lenin wrote a long letter to Gorky, who had written anxiously from Germany concerning the arrests of intellectuals. Lenin's letter expressed the essence of his attitude to the intelligentsia, and no doubt inspired his successors to reduce Soviet intellectuals to performing the role of obedient servants. According to Yelena Kuskova, formerly a leading liberal, in 1922 an émigrée and sharply critical observer of the Soviet scene, Gorky was wavering; he was drawn to his homeland, but was hearing terrible news about the continuing execution of his people.⁹⁹ Under great pressure from Moscow to return, Gorky, whose life reflected in its own way something of the tragedy of the Russian intelligentsia, was still holding out. To retain his artistic freedom he had to remain abroad, but it was more than he could stand. His letter to Lenin, protesting and begging him to protect the intelligentsia, sounded like the last spasm of his freedom.

Lenin's reply was dogmatic, angry, peremptory and harsh. It was as if he already knew that Gorky, and with him the remnants of the intelligentsia still left in the country, would be broken and won over. Having admitted that ‘mistakes were made’ during the arrests, Lenin nevertheless concluded that it was also ‘clear that the arrest of the Kadets and near-Kadets was both necessary and correct’. He lectured Gorky:

It is wrong to confuse the intellectual forces of the people with the forces of the bourgeois intellectuals. I take [the writer Vladimir] Korolenko as an example: I recently read his pamphlet ‘War, the Fatherland and Mankind’, which he wrote in August 1917. He's probably the best of the ‘near-Kadets’, practically a Menshevik. Yet what a vile, mean, disgusting defence of the imperialist war it is, and coated with sugary phrases! He's a pitiful philistine, trapped in bourgeois prejudices! For gentlemen such as this ten million dead in the imperialist war is something worth supporting … while the death of hundreds of thousands in a just civil war against landowners and capitalists makes them oh! and ah! and sigh and go into hysterics.

Lenin continued: ‘The intellectual forces of the workers and peasants are growing and getting stronger in the struggle to overthrow the bourgeoisie and their accomplices, the intellectuals, the lackeys of capital, who think they're the brains of the nation. In fact, they're not its brains, they're its shit.’ Lenin could scarcely have expressed his feelings for Russia and the intelligentsia more graphically or forcefully. He could not end his letter without striking a smarting blow at Gorky himself:

More than once, on Capri and later, I told you that you allow yourself to be surrounded by the worst elements of the Russian intelligentsia and that you give in to their whining … I completely understand, completely, completely understand that it's possible to write oneself into saying that the Reds are just as much enemies of the people as the Whites (the fighters for the overthrow of the capitalists and landlords just as much enemies of the people as the landlords and capitalists), and also into believing in God Almighty or the Tsar, our Little Father. I completely understand.

Truly, you'll perish [here Lenin added a note: ‘Because you're not writing. To waste yourself on the whining of rotten intellectuals and not to be writing is the same as death for a writer, isn't it a shame?’] if you don't tear yourself away from this environment of bourgeois intellectuals! From my heart I wish you would tear yourself away as soon as possible.

With best wishes.

Yours, Lenin.¹⁰⁰

For an individual to hold such a poisonous view of the Russian intelligentsia was one thing, but in the head of the new Soviet state and leader of the Bolshevik Party it spelled disaster. Lenin had long ago made it plain that he did not trust the intelligentsia, and that ‘the business of literature must become a component part … of Party work’. Once he had accepted Marxism as an absolute truth, he denied every other point of view the right to exist. His outlook became the expression of a secular religion and, like a religious fanatic, he could not countenance the sort of intellectual balancing of arguments, for and against the Reds and the Whites, of which he accused Gorky. And of course, as the architect of the October experiment, he had the authority to demand that others follow his line.

In an extensive memorandum to Stalin in the autumn of 1922, Lenin targeted individuals who were either associated with anti-Bolshevik publications or whom he regarded as especially perceptive opponents of his régime. The memorandum conveys the tone of Lenin's obsessive concern to rid himself of such people:

On the question of expelling Mensheviks, Popular Socialists, Kadets, etc., I'd like to ask a few questions, as this matter, which was started before I went on leave, is still unfinished. Has it been decided to ‘uproot’ all Popular Socialists? Peshekhonov, Myakotin, Gornfeld? Petrishchev and the others? I think they should all be expelled. They're more dangerous than any SR, because they're more cunning. Also A.N. Potresov, Izgoev and all the people on [the journal] Ekonomist, (Ozerov and many many more). The Mensheviks Rozanov (a physician, cunning), Vigdorchik (Migulo, or some such), Lyubov Nikolaevna Radchenko and her young daughter (allegedly the most malicious enemies of Bolshevism); N.A. Rozhkov (he has to be expelled; he's incorrigible); S.L. Frank (the author of Methodology), the Mantsev-Messing commission should compile lists and several hundred such gentlemen should be deported from the country without mercy. We'll cleanse Russia once and for all.

As for Lezhnev … we should think about it: shouldn't we expel him? He'll always be utterly crafty, as far as I can judge from his articles. Like all the people on Ekonomist, Ozerov is the most relentless enemy. All of them must be chucked out of Russia. It should be done all at once. By the time the SR trial is over, not later, and with no explanation of motives—leave, gentlemen!

All the authors in Writers' House and [Petrograd] Mysl' [‘Thought’]; Kharkov must be ransacked, we have no idea what's happening there, it's ‘abroad’ to us. It must be cleaned out quickly, not later than the end of the SR trial. Pay attention to the writers in [Petrograd] (their addresses are in Novaya russkaya kniga, No. 4, 1922, p. 37) and also to the list of private publishers (p. 29).’¹⁰¹ Lenin's police instructions, disconnected but written in indelible pencil, as it were in a single breath, are remorseless and cruel, and a note in Stalin's hand shows that they were despatched at once to Dzerzhinsky as the leader's orders. For twenty-five years after the Twentieth Congress the Russian people asked themselves where Stalin had acquired the cruelty which he inflicted on his fellow-countymen. None of us—the present author included—could begin to imagine that the father of domestic Russian terrorism, merciless and totalitarian, was Lenin. Where Lenin acquired his own cruelty is another question: unlike Stalin's, his childhood had been benign, and he had spent a pleasant enough life in prosperous countries and cities abroad. It can only have been from the philosophy of ‘revolutionary law and morality’ that Lenin absorbed the notion that everything is allowed in the name of the goal. As Machiavelli had written: ‘Leaders are judged by results, therefore they should try to maintain their power and win victory. Whatever means they use to achieve this, they will always be thought worthy and approved.’¹⁰² The fanatical belief that history would justify whatever means he employed, if he reached his goal, was firmly fixed in Lenin's mind when, quite unexpectedly, power fell into his hands.

The Party leader, in the manner of the head of the secret police, was setting an example to the Chekists on how to deal with neglected Party directives. He returned to the theme of deportations at the end of 1922, when he telephoned an order to Stalin, via his chief secretary, Lydia Fotieva, about another free-thinker, N. A. Rozhkov: ‘I propose, first, that Rozhkov be expelled abroad, secondly, if this doesn't go through (for instance, on the grounds that his age deserves consideration), then … send him to Pskov to live in bearable conditions and with adequate means and work. But he must be kept under strict surveillance, for he is and will no doubt remain our enemy to the end.’¹⁰³

Thus, Lenin was personally involved in realizing his sinister formula: ‘We shall cleanse Russia for a long time to come.’ Cleanse it, that is, of intellectual conscience. He was not deterred by the notion of pointing the finger at his victims, despite the fact that he was personally acquainted with many of them. If his letter to Gorky expressed his attitude to the intelligentsia, then his note to Stalin was a concrete instruction. In August 1922, the Politburo followed his lead when it approved Unshlikht's proposal to ‘expel abroad counter-revolutionary elements among the students’ and to ‘form a commission consisting of Kamenev, Unshlikht and Preobrazhensky’.¹⁰⁴ The Bolsheviks were looking ahead, and were uprooting the green shoots of the next generation of intellectuals.

Lenin had refined his view of the creative artist in 1908, when analysing Leo Tolstoy.¹⁰⁵ His article ‘Leo Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution’ is extremely illuminating, in that it shows Lenin as capable of seeing the great author only in terms of the revolution. He wrote:

On the one hand, he is an artist of genius who has given not only incomparable pictures of Russian life, but also first-class works of world literature. On the other hand, he is a landowner, an idiot in Christ. On the one hand, he makes a remarkably strong, direct and sincere protest against social lies and hypocrisy, on the other hand, he is a ‘Tolstoyan’, i.e. a worn-out, hysterical sniveller, called a Russian intellectual, who beats his breast and says: ‘I'm foul, I'm vile, but I am practising moral self-improvement; I don't eat meat anymore and now feed on rice cutlets.’¹⁰⁶

Lenin remained bogged down in his class dug-out, with his superficial view of Tolstoy, while the great writer espoused the imperatives of universal human values. Tolstoy, however, had been necessary to Lenin, to show him the pointlessness and insignificance of the Russian intelligentsia. The intelligentsia was, of course, multi-faceted, and to see it, as Lenin did, as a body of ‘worn-out, hysterical snivellers’, was to take a narrow, class viewpoint.

A significant number of writers, academics, engineers, and others, finding themselves in desperate straits, tried to leave the country under their own steam, but the Politburo and GPU were quick to react. Yagoda wrote to the Central Committee that his agency had ‘statements by a number of writers, notably, [Zinaïda] Vengerova, [Alexander] Blok, [Fedor] Sologub, about leaving the country’. Yagoda warned: ‘taking into account the fact that writers who leave carry on the most active campaign against Soviet Russia and that some of them, like [Konstantin] Balmont, [Alexander] Kuprin, [Ivan] Bunin, stoop to the most vile initiatives, the Cheka does not think it proper to approve these applications’.¹⁰⁷

The treatment of well-known artists and intellectuals became a matter of great sensitivity—and public relations importance—when the Soviet Union was seeking diplomatic recognition and acceptance by the outside world in the early 1920s, and therefore in due course most of those named above were permitted to leave. The Ukrainian intelligentsia were to be treated somewhat differently: the Politburo accepted Unshlikht's proposal that, ‘instead of expulsion abroad, they should be deported to remote regions of the RSFSR’.¹⁰⁸

Many wanted to leave, especially those who saw no prospect of continuing their creative work in Soviet Russia. Indeed, there soon emerged in emigration a regeneration of Russian literature, characterized by originality, love of liberty and honesty, and continuing the tradition of literary Russia. The critic Gleb Struve could justifiably ask: ‘What has Soviet Russian literature to compare with Bunin's The Lives of Arsenyev, Remizov's work as an émigré, Shmelev's best efforts, the historical-philosophical novels of Aldanov, the poetry of Khodasevich and Tsvetaeva, or the highly original novels of Nabokov?’¹⁰⁹ The names of many other writers and philosophers could be added to the list, but the thought of their exclusion from their homeland inevitably prompts the reflection that, had Lenin not expelled them, they would surely have succumbed to Stalin's guillotine a decade or so later.

People also tried to leave the country in groups. In May 1921 the Politburo discussed an application to go abroad from the First Studio of the Moscow Arts Theatre, and decided to postpone a decision until Lunacharsky had reported on how many people from the scholarly and artistic world, who had already been allowed to go abroad, had actually returned home.¹¹⁰ Most traffic was, indeed, one-way, and it was westward. By 1921-22, artists who had welcomed the revolution as a unique moment of creative freedom were ready to leave for a more tolerant environment, often in Paris and Berlin. Once again, some of the best-known names of the Russian artistic world were to be found outside their native country: Chagall, Kandinsky, Soutine; Diaghilev and his Russian Ballet; the composers Prokofiev and Stravinsky.

This large-scale emigration of leading Soviet citizens was surely clear proof that the system was fatally flawed. Even in Lenin's day the Bolshevik government sensed that the exodus of the intelligentsia would harm wide areas of the economy. On 9 August 1923 the Politburo, chaired by Kamenev, discussed a memorandum by Dzerzhinsky, who wrote: ‘There are several quite important Russian specialists living abroad in difficult circumstances who would like to return to Russia to work. And we lack specialists. The best ones we have are those we got from Kolchak, Denikin and Wrangel, who were for some reason not shot. They [those abroad] should make individual application and be given Soviet citizenship.’ It was decided that ‘Russian specialists should be allowed to return from abroad and be given work’.¹¹¹ But if during the civil war the intelligentsia had left the country in an avalanche, those who returned formed a mere trickle. But of course there remained those who were ‘for some reason not shot’.

In 1923 the Politburo instructed the Cheka ‘to organize the disintegration of the White Guard emigration and to use some of them in the interests of the Soviet regime’. In due course, a special Foreign Section of the OGPU was created, and carried out extensive operations among Russian émigrés, including the ‘liquidation’ of ‘especially dangerous enemies of the Soviet regime’. The voluminous files of reports from agents in Western capitals show how the authorities first expelled masses of intellectuals, then did their utmost to ‘disunite’ them, using scandal, bribery and playing off one group against another. Files were opened on leading scholars, writers and, of course, political figures, in which their every move and utterance was recorded, all collected under the general heading ‘Russian emigration’.

Interestingly, the Soviet secret service made an attempt to insinuate itself into Berdyaev's confidence and to use his name and influence. According to agent Kal, however, Berdyaev would be of no use, for ‘he criticizes Communism, is a determined enemy of materialist philosophy and only wants to discuss teleology’. It was perhaps for this reason that Berdyaev appears in the files of the Foreign Section under the name ‘Confessor’.¹¹² After several attempts, Menzhinsky's agents gave up and left the philosopher in peace.

The Soviet regime was also troubled by the fact that the Russian émigrés, despite having lost their homeland and often having to survive in poverty, had quickly established their own publishing houses and periodical press, in which the leading lights participated. Preventive measures were taken to ensure that the Soviet citizenry was protected from the ‘putrid bourgeois influence’ that would ensue should such publications filter into the country.

For the expelled intelligentsia the greatest tragedy was the loss of their homeland, while for those who remained in Soviet Russia it was the loss of creative freedom. Those who did not accept the revolution tried to change things in the country, while also attempting to adapt themselves to the bitter new reality. In this connection, the ‘Case of the Doctors’* is pertinent.

In the early summer of 1922, the All-Russian Congress of Physicians met in Moscow. Health Commissar Semashko reported to Lenin and the Politburo:

The recent Congress of Physicians revealed such important and dangerous trends in our lives that I believe it essential not to leave the members of the Politburo in further ignorance … A campaign was waged at the congress against Soviet medicine, while local government medicine and health insurance were eulogized. Delegates debated efforts to support the Kadets and Mensheviks, and to create their own periodical. As for removing the doctors' leaders, Granovsky, Manul, Vigdorchik and Livin, the GPU should be consulted. Wouldn't arrest increase their popularity?¹¹³

Lenin saw something more dangerous in the doctors' independent thinking, and wrote a note on Semashko's report: ‘To Comrade Stalin. I think this ought to be shown to Dzerzhinsky and all members of the Politburo, in strict secrecy and without making copies, and an appropriate directive should be issued.’¹¹⁴ Two sessions of the Politburo were devoted to the ‘Case of the Doctors’, the first on 28 May and the second on 8 June. Only Tomsky abstained from voting for repressive measures, declaring that ‘the matter of the physicians' congress requires a different approach. We are in many ways guilty.’ Lenin's resolution was nonetheless passed on ‘anti-Soviet groupings among the Soviet intelligentsia’.¹¹⁵

These outright police and punitive measures heralded the further strengthening of totalitarian tendencies. The Party began determining everything in intellectual life: what could be written, who could be praised, who was to be hated, who could be published and who rewarded. Thus, on 13 September 1922 the Politburo under Lenin's chairmanship debated a question from Pokrovsky on who was to be allowed to give lectures in the Institute of Red Professors. It was decided that ‘Deborin and [Lyubov] Axelrod be permitted to give lectures on Marxist philosophy, but Bazarov should not be allowed to lecture on capital’.¹¹⁶ In February 1921 the Politburo had devoted more time and attention to Krasin's question about selling the late empress's letters and diaries abroad than it did to the famine in Russia.¹¹⁷ Whatever had even the smallest ideological dimension was regarded by the Bolsheviks as a strategic matter. The return from abroad of White General Slashchev was permitted with the proviso that he write ‘memoirs on the period of his struggle with Soviet Russia’,¹¹⁸ naturally with the aim of ‘unmasking’ the White movement. Even shorthand typists were provided—not that any of this prevented the assassination of the general himself in 1929, probably with the connivance of the secret police.

The intelligentsia were ultimately the bearers of the indestructible idea of liberalism, and liberalism, for as long as it retained any political influence, was a guarantee against the worst excesses of the proletarian dictatorship. Lenin understood this better than most, and hence, long before the events of October 1917, he had launched savage attacks on the liberal bourgeoisie. As early as the beginning of 1905, in an article entitled ‘The Workers' and Bourgeois Democracy’, he had written that social democracy consisted of two wings: the first was proletarian and intellectual, while the second was liberal and incapable of taking decisive revolutionary action. Liberalism was a movement of the bourgeoisie, and that was all that need be said of it. And liberal intellectuals were capable only of making an alliance with the bourgeoisie.¹¹⁹

Since it was the Mensheviks among the social democrats who were closest to liberalism, it was they who were above all branded ‘conciliators’. Lenin was perfectly aware that a radical doctrine like Bolshevism would have no chance in ‘normal’ parliamentary political struggle, or within the framework of a functioning Constituent Assembly. The latter would inevitably become the expression of liberal moderation, and was therefore anathema to Lenin, and he and his Politburo therefore continued to rain blows on liberalism and its bearers, the Russian intelligentsia. On 11 January 1923 the Politburo formulated an order for the GPU ‘to intensify surveillance of individuals in the liberal professions and simultaneously to take measures to render enemies of the Soviet regime harmless’.¹²⁰

The expulsion of members of the intelligentsia abroad, and the deportations to remote regions were systematic attacks, yet the intelligentsia, however trampled upon, did not as a rule reply in kind: it behaved like an intelligentsia. In 1931 the first editorial of a new liberal journal, Novyi grad, published in Paris, declared: ‘A generation raised in bloodshed believes in the saving power of violence.’ The authors called upon their readers not to yield to feelings of vengeance, but to defend the eternal truth of freedom of the individual and humanitarianism. ‘We see no future for the hangmen of Russia. Only by the path of Christianity is social justice possible.’¹²¹ It was inconceivable that Lenin, the personification of the proletarian dictatorship, could have found a common language with the proponents of such a view. The tragedy of the intelligentsia was predetermined by the incompatibility of the Bolshevik dictatorship and liberty. The regime needed an obedient, compliant intelligentsia.

In both the Leninist and post-Leninist periods, these characteristics were achieved by very simple and, it would seem, effective methods. On 15 July 1937, for instance, Yezhov wrote to Stalin: ‘I am sending you a report of 4 July 1937 from Comrade Dmitriev, head of Sverdlovsk regional NKVD on the writer V.V. Kamensky. I think it essential to arrest V.V. Kamensky. I request your approval.’ Dmitriev had reported that ‘Kamensky is sympathetic to the Futurists [avant-garde poets and writers]. Bukharin was enthusiastic about him. His distant relations were shipowners. He was friendly with Govin who has been unmasked as a Trotskyist.’¹²² After such devastating arguments, Stalin could only agree to Kamensky's arrest.

After the Twentieth Congress, to be sure, other ways of holding human thought captive had to be found, if the intellect was to remain under the vigilant control of the Party and special services. The system Lenin created remained in being for decades as he had made it, and the slightest attempt to move beyond the permitted limits raised a mighty outcry from his heirs. The following abbreviated extracts from a session of the Central Committee Secretariat of 26 April 1983, are illustrative. The meeting was discussing the play Dear Elena Sergeevna, by Lyudmilla Razumovskaya.

GORBACHEV: This is a serious matter. I have asked the heads of the Central Committee sections, representatives of the Ministry of Culture of the USSR and RSFSR and the Council of Ministers of the Russian Federation to remain so that we may go over the matter thoroughly. Comrade Barabash, please tell us how it could happen that a play that is so ideologically harmful could be shown on the stages of our theatres for so many months? How is it that the question of taking it off was raised not by the Ministry of Culture, but by the Committee for State Security [KGB]?

BARABASH (FIRST DEPUTY MINISTER OF CULTURE OF THE USSR): The staging of L. Razumovskaya's play, Dear Elena Sergeevna, was a serious omission by the Ministry of Culture of the USSR, its organs in the republics and in the localities … We have taken into consideration the fact that the RSFSR Ministry of Culture ordered its local organs to examine the question of whether there should be any further staging of Razumovskaya's play. The play is being rewritten at present, and so there is no question of its being staged in its present form.

GORBACHEV: The fact that this matter has been brought to the attention of the Central Committee Secretariat is already abnormal … We in the Party Central Committee are not going to debate the staging of every play. Those who have made such mistakes should be severely punished.

BARABASH: It should just be noted that in most of the theatres, the text of the play was somewhat corrected, altered and reworked.

PONOMAREV: What could possibly be reworked in such a squalid play, and why rework it at all?

GORBACHEV: The Ministry of Culture has ducked out of handling the difficult issue of the training of playwrights. But for how long are we, Communists, going to shrink from defending our Party positions, our Communist morality?

PONOMAREV: Who is this L. Razumovskaya, anyway?

BARABASH: She's a woman of thirty-five who teaches in a technical school, a non-Party member. She wrote four other plays before this one, but none of them has been put on …

GORBACHEV: Yet the Ministry of Culture said nothing for a whole year while the play was being put on in the country's theatres.

RYZHKOV: Has anything appeared in our press about this play?

BARABASH: Viktor Rozov came out in defence of it in Literaturnaya gazeta. And Sovetskaya kultura carried a positive review of it.

ZIMYANIN: This business of Dear Elena Sergeevna is not the only one. There have been other attempts to criticize negative phenomena in our life which have gone as far as to blacken Soviet reality … It is the Party's policy to nip such phenomena in the bud, to work with the writers and playwrights and correct their work as they write it … When a play is ready, we have repertoire commissions to evaluate it, and finally there's Glavlit whose job is to make sure nothing anti-Soviet is published …

SOLOMENTSEV: The staff at the Ministry of Culture don't want to spoil their relations with the playwrights and writers. They want the Party Central Committee's cultural staff to spoil these relations …

SHAURO (CHIEF OF THE CULTURAL SECTION OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE): The USSR Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, Lithuania, Estonia, Georgia, unfortunately, still work badly with the playwrights … They need help to understand complicated phenomena of reality from a Party point of view. Dear Elena Sergeevna has been staged in all ninety-eight times, and about 50,000 people have seen it. In my view there is no need to rework this play. It is not reworkable.

GORBACHEV: So a view of our disorders is being opened up in a very important sphere of ideological work.

KOCHEMASOV (DEPUTY CHAIRMAN OF THE COUNCIL OF MINISTERS OF THE RSFSR): Actually, there have been articles not only in the central press, but also in the local papers. They were mostly positive. Only the Irkutsk Komsomol paper sharply criticized Razumovskaya's play as ideologically harmful …

GORBACHEV: Why didn't you pick up on that article, why didn't you draw the proper conclusions?

KOCHEMASOV: That, I'm afraid, is my fault. It's high time we restructured our work with the people in culture, and raised responsibility.

GORBACHEV: Since you understand this, why don't you restructure yourselves?

KOCHEMASOV: This was simply a case where our system of control broke down.

GORBACHEV: But still how could it be that a play that is ideologically harmful could have received positive support in our newspapers?

STUKALIN (HEAD OF PROPAGANDA SECTION OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE): We knew nothing about this in our Section, nor did we take any note of Rozov's article in Literaturnaya gazeta.

SOLOMENTSEV: When Viktor Rozov comes out in defence of any work, one should be on one's guard.

ZAMYATIN: I completely agree with the view that the people in the [Chief Repertoire Commission] don't want to quarrel with the playwrights. There are nine plays that have been taken off in Moscow right now. Yet they were all passed by the Repertoire Commission.

BOBKOV (DEPUTY CHAIRMAN OF THE KGB): The main reason why such an ideologically defective play could be put on is the absence of control. But it should be noted that sometimes a play gets well vetted and the text is not bad, and yet it turns out to be ideologically harmful when it's staged, that's to say it's so altered by the director …

SOLOMENTSEV: This question has to be seen in a wider context. This isn't the first time we've come across an ideologically harmful work that has been dragged onto the stage or the cinema, aimed at an immature public, at young people … For instance, who needs a play like the one on now at the Moscow Arts Theatre, Vampilov's Duck Shoot? It blackens our entire system.

GORBACHEV: Without turning this incident into an absolute, it must frankly be said that we have an obligation to fight against such phenomena and not let our foot slip off the brake. Just listen to what one of the characters says in a dialogue with the father: ‘I ask you, Dad, what are these ideals that are just making the people laugh at you? Well, name one of them? They're shaking with laughter. I tell you, the people have become swine. Bourgeois and cattle. They live without laws. Well, never mind, I say, it's the times we live in.’ How can we ignore such a speech? If I may say so, such a statement is enough to put any Soviet person on guard. And especially anyone in the cultural sphere or a censor. We have to conclude that there is a lack of control and an absence of political alertness.¹²³

After decades of control, the intelligentsia was still capable of protest and intellectual resistance, even if only in a passive way. As in earlier years, the Party leadership was still bent on maintaining its monopoly not only on power, but also on thought, even on the threshold of perestroika. Even Gorbachev, who could see farther and deeper than his colleagues in the Politburo, was still constrained to do everything, as before, in the ‘Leninist way’.

Lenin and the Church

‘Electricity will take the place of God. Let the peasant pray to electricity; he's going to feel the power of the central authorities more than that of heaven,’ Lenin said in 1918, during a discussion with Leonid Krasin on the electrification of Russia.¹²⁴

The peasant accepted electricity readily enough, but it did not replace God for him. He had carried God in his heart since childhood, nurtured there by the popular culture, by the splendour of religious ceremony and the beauty of the liturgy. Perhaps God's hold on the Russians would have been even stronger, had He not been so closely associated in the public mind with the tsar. Once the tsar fell, the people's faith in God was also shaken. Lenin took careful account of the Russian duality of religion and monarchy. Unlike the former Marxists Struve and Berdyaev, he did not engage in agonized meditation on the question, but he summed up his views on religion in society in some propaganda pamphlets early in the century and in a few Party directives.

G.M. Krzhizhanovsky related that Lenin told him that ‘already in the fifth class in high school [at the age of sixteen], I broke sharply with all questions of religion: I took off my cross and threw it in the rubbish bin’.¹²⁵ Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that both his parents were devout believers,¹²⁶ and that his school required church attendance, Lenin was certainly a convinced atheist by the time he left school.

In principle, Lenin recognized freedom of conscience—but not freedom of belief, for he saw religion as ‘a form of spiritual oppression’ and, parroting Marx, ‘the opium of the people’.¹²⁷ Since he had never closely embraced religion, the move from a tenuously held faith in his school years to materialism was easy and unmarked. Untroubled by the thought that life's problems cannot be explained by economic determinism and dialectical materialism alone, Lenin never wondered why Marxism's ‘simple’ explanations often bordered on mystical incantations, demanding almost as much faith as formal religion.

Religion, he declared, must be a private matter. Sounding like a true liberal, he wrote: ‘We demand the complete separation of Church and state in order to combat religious fog with purely ideological and only ideological weapons, with our press, with our words.’¹²⁸ In 1905, nobody paid much attention to what Lenin had to say on this issue, but once in power he set about putting his ideas into practice. The Church was indeed separated from the state. The Bolshevik press was predictably abusive about the clergy—‘counter-revolutionaries in cassocks’—but it seemed that that was as far as it might go; after all, Lenin had promised to use ideology alone to combat the Church's influence. Given his other policies, it is surprising that he did not launch his fatal blow against the Church until 1922, when his own physical resources were ebbing away. The Church, moreover, had maintained a low profile. The Provisional Government had reestablished the position of Patriarch of Russia, abolished by Peter the Great in the eighteenth century, and the new Patriarch, Tikhon, was a man of independent spirit. He had refused to bless the White movement in 1918, perhaps sensing the approach of the Red Terror, perhaps the failure of the Whites. In any event, he presented a manifestly neutral image.

The Patriarch had wanted to meet Lenin to discuss the question of the Troitsky-Sergievsky Monastery outside Moscow, which Lenin had ordered to be converted into a museum of atheism. Tikhon protested, begged, wrote letters, all in vain. The Bolsheviks apparently believed that even a business contact with the clergy would compromise them, and Lenin wanted to demonstrate the way in which they should behave towards the Church. He refused to meet either the Patriarch or other Church elders who were seeking a modus vivendi with the new authorities. He did not want to hold talks with the very people he was only awaiting the opportunity to liquidate.

There were some 80,000 churches in Russia, most of them Orthodox. Several times Unshlikht reminded Lenin of the ‘fabulous treasures’ to be found in them. Finally the opportunity to deal with the Church presented itself: namely, the famine of 1921-22. If the Stalinist famine of the early 1930s was artificially created by the regime and carefully concealed from the outside world, and even from much of the Russian population, the Leninist famine was there for all to see. Even Comintern was mobilized, appealing to the workers of Europe to give one day's pay a week for famine relief to Russia. The first to sound the tocsin, however, was Patriarch Tikhon. In an appeal to the people, he wrote: ‘Carrion has become a delicacy for the starving population, but even this “delicacy” is not to be found. The cries and moans are to be heard on all sides. It has even brought cannibalism. Of thirteen million starving, only two million have received aid. Stretch out your hands to help your starving brothers and sisters! With the agreement of the believers, you can use the treasures in the churches to help the starving (rings, chains and bracelets that adorn the holy icons, silver and gold staves).’¹²⁹

The Politburo discussed the Patriarch's initiative on 7 July 1921, and agreed to broadcast his appeal on the radio. Of the senior leadership, only Lenin, Trotsky and Molotov were present, and the debate was lively. Trotsky also wanted to publish Tikhon's appeal in the Bolshevik press, but Lenin was thinking beyond the moment, and was looking for a way to exploit the crisis in order to confiscate the Church's riches and thus clip its wings once and for all.

In August, Tikhon again appealed to the public and Orthodox Christians. An All-Russian Church Committee was formed to help the starving, and priests were asked to give up those church treasures ‘which have no liturgical use’. At the same time, a public committee for famine relief was created by liberals. Headed by S.N. Prokopovich, Y.D. Kuskova and N.M. Kishkin, it earned the nickname ‘Prokukish’, and the files relating to it the label ‘Kukish’, a derisive term of contempt.¹³⁰ On 27 August 1921 Lenin ordered the immediate arrest of Prokopovich and all the other non-Communist members of the Aid Committee.¹³¹ He could not allow any leeway to ‘the wilful bourgeoisie’ who, according to Unshlikht's reports, were linked with the SRs and carrying on anti-Soviet propaganda. The Bolsheviks were uncomfortable enough with the idea of famine relief coming from the Church and Western charities, and would not countenance such aid being organized by the bourgeoisie.

According to incomplete data, in 1921-22 there were about twenty-five million people starving in Russia. During this time the Party leadership was sending vast sums of money, and a large quantity of gold and treasure, to foreign Communist Parties to help ignite world revolution. Again according to incomplete data, in the course of 1922 gold and treasure, much of it of Church origin, to the value of more than nineteen million gold roubles were thus transmitted. Moscow's emissaries carried money to China, India, Persia, Hungary, Italy, France, England, Germany, Finland and elsewhere in a bid to give a new impulse to the revolutionary process.

The famine meanwhile was appalling. People were eating carrion and dead bodies, although the Politburo banned any mention of cannibalism in the press. On 23 February 1922 the public learned from their newspapers that a government decree had been issued on the forcible confiscation of all valuables from Russian churches. It was not stated that this decree had first been personally approved by Lenin and confirmed by the Politburo.

Party organizations, the GPU and specially formed units began to burst into churches, where they read out the decree and demanded the voluntary handing over of all treasure. The priests were willing to surrender everything but Eucharistie objects. Local atheists either pushed the clergy aside or arrested them, and carried out their own confiscations. It was systematic robbery, perpetrated with the widespread support of criminal elements.

In many places believers offered resistance. In mid-March Lenin received a GPU report that mayhem had broken out in the small town of Shuya, near Ivanovo. After three small churches had been stripped and an inventory taken of valuables in the Shuya synagogue, a local Party commission, accompanied by militia, had arrived at the church. A large crowd had gathered, fighting broke out, and someone started ringing the church bells. A half-company of the 146th Infantry was called out. Machine-guns were fired, blood flowed, people were killed. That evening the congregation of the church took about a hundred pounds of silver valuables to the local Party committee. The confiscation commission was not satisfied, and removed a further 360 pounds of silver and a quantity of gold objects and precious stones.

The Cheka reported that the disturbances had been organized by the ‘Black Hundreds clergy’, even though, as elswhere, it was plain that the protest had been spontaneous. Lenin was outraged. Usually able to control himself, now he stormed and cursed—until he realized that a golden opportunity had presented itself to finish off the clergy in one fell swoop, especially Patriarch Tikhon, who had responded to the confiscation decree with another appeal to the people. Reiterating the Church's commitment to famine relief, Tikhon described the acts of confiscation as sacrilege. The Church, he wrote, ‘allowed the surrender of church objects if they were not used for the Eucharist … But we cannot approve the removal from churches, even voluntarily, of holy objects, the use of which for non-Eucharistic purposes is prohibited by the canons of the Universal Church and is punishable as sacrilege, with excommunication for laymen and expulsion from holy orders for priests.’¹³²

Lenin took Tikhon's appeal as a call for organized resistance and a challenge to the regime, and personally set about formulating the Party's policy to crush the Church. He was taking one of his numerous breaks, this time at the village of Korzinkino near Troitsko-Lykovo in Moscow province, and Krupskaya recalled that during their walks Lenin talked frequently on anti-religious themes. He also wrote a major article for the journal Pod znamenem marksizma (Under the Banner of Marxism), tided ‘On the Meaning of Militant Materialism’. He was completely geared up for his campaign against the Church.

On 11 March 1922 he wrote to Trotsky to ensure that the Politburo had issued instructions for the collection of figures on the number of churches that had been ‘cleansed’, i.e. stripped.¹³³ At the same time he requested regular information on the number of clergy being arrested and executed. The Cheka sent him several reports in the second half of March on ‘the revolutionary repression of priests and other religious functionaries’. The Politburo had already followed Lenin's proposal to ‘provide information on attempts by rebellious priests’ and to shoot ringleaders,¹³⁴ and on 4 May formally passed a decree ordering ‘the death penalty for priests’.¹³⁵

The contents of a six-page letter Lenin wrote on the events at Shuya, to Molotov as Secretary of the Central Committee and for perusal by the Politburo, were concealed even from true Leninists. In a mere five lines the ‘Biographical Chronicle’ notes that he ‘regards it as essential that the VTsIK decree of 23 February 1922 on the removal of church valuables be carried out resolutely’.¹³⁶ In the Complete Works the letter received six lines, in an appendix of a more frank nature: ‘Lenin in his letter to the members of the Politburo wrote of the need to crush clergy resistance to the decree …’¹³⁷

In his latter years, Lenin usually confined himself to notes and comments and hastily scribbled papers. This long and carefully thought-out letter, written on 19 March, was an exception. Lenin was always careful that such materials should remain classified, and on this letter he wrote an important preliminary note: ‘I request that under no circumstances should copies be made, and members of the Politburo (including Comrade Kalinin) should write their comments on the letter itself.’ He knew that what he was writing could not be justified by any ‘revolutionary expediency’. His pen was guided by the hand of an inquisitor. The letter, moreover, went far beyond expressing his attitude to the Church alone: it mirrors his political and moral personality. It is too extensive to reproduce in full, but extracts suffice to convey its message.

Concerning events in Shuya, which are to be discussed by the Politburo, I think a firm decision should be taken right now in connection with the general plan of struggle on this front … If what the papers are reporting about the clergy's attitude to the decree on removing church valuables is combined with what we know of Patriarch Tikhon's illegal appeal, it becomes perfectly clear that the Black Hundreds clergy, under their leader, are carrying out a premeditated plan to offer decisive battle precisely at this moment.

Typically, Lenin spoke in terms of war. He also garbled the intent of Tikhon's appeal. It was of course he, not the Church, who was planning to launch a crushing blow. The measures he regarded as essential were listed later in the letter.

There is a ninety-nine per cent chance of smashing the enemy on the head with complete success and of guaranteeing positions essential for us for many decades to come. With the starving in the localities eating people and the roads littered with hundreds if not thousands of dead bodies, it is now and only now that we can (and therefore must) carry out the removal of church valuables with furious and pitiless energy … We can secure for ourselves a fund of several hundred million gold roubles (think of the riches of some of the monasteries). Without such a fund no state work in general, no economic construction in particular, and no defence of our position at [the Genoa Conference in 1922, where Soviet Russia and the Allied forces unsuccessfully attempted a reconciliation] is at all thinkable. We must at all costs take into our hands this fund of several hundred million roubles (maybe even several billion).

No mention here of aid to the starving. And how, it may be asked, had Lenin intended to ‘build socialism’, if he could now declare that economic construction would be unthinkable without the confiscated wealth of the Church? During all his years in power, Lenin seems to have been obsessed with confiscation and requisition: factories, banks, grain, roads, personal valuables, houses, clothes (there were special decrees for removing warm clothes and footwear from the bourgeoisie), theatres, schools, presses—one vast process of dispossession.

The letter continued:

… a wise writer on state questions has rightly said that, if one has to commit a number of cruelties to gain a certain political aim, then it is essential to carry them out in the most energetic way possible and in the shortest possible time, for the people will not endure the long-drawn-out application of harsh measures.

Lenin was wrong. The people he was leading to Communism endured incredibly harsh measures for decades. The civil war alone cost Russia thirteen million lives. In the period between the civil war and the collectivization, during the ‘happy years of NEP’, about one million died in camps or in the crushing of anti-Soviet resistance in the interior. And between 1929 and 1953, when ‘the first Leninist’ died, another 21.5 million perished.

In his letter Lenin remarked that the international situation was favourable for a general punitive operation against the Church ‘of such ferocity that it will not forget it for decades to come’.¹³⁸ This undoubtedly was to be the case: the Church was made into a servant of the Party, with a huge number of Party agents infiltrated among its personnel. From about 80,000 churches in 1905, by 1950 the number had been reduced to no more than 11,525, despite the revival that had taken place during the Second World War, when Stalin turned to the Church for support.¹³⁹

Lenin's onslaught on the Russian Church is comparable with Stalin's war on the peasantry. It probably caused more spiritual and physical damage to the Church than it had suffered at any other time in its history. According to a variety of data, between fourteen and twenty thousand clergy and active laymen were shot. This was not a large bag by Lenin's standards, particularly as in his letter he had demanded that ‘the greater the number of reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie shot over this issue, the better’.

As for Shuya, Lenin recommended that the Politburo issue a directive, ‘so that the trial of the Shuya rebels, who were opposed to famine relief, should be carried out with maximum speed and should conclude in no other way than by the shooting of a very large number of the most influential and dangerous of Shuya's Black Hundredists, and if possible not only of this town, but also of Moscow and a number of other spiritual centres’.¹⁴⁰

Lenin dictated the draft of his letter over the telephone to his secretary, Lydia Fotieva, on the day of the Politburo meeting, as he was not planning to attend. The Politburo devoted several sessions to the letter, since the Church question was of such importance. On 20 March Kamenev, Stalin, Trotsky and Molotov discussed a decree drafted by Trotsky, as chairman of the Revolutionary War Council, and the seventeen-point decree was approved, with some amendments. A central commission was formed, consisting of Yakovlev, Sapronov, Unshlikht, Krasikov, Vinokurov and Bazilevich. It would be under Trotsky's supervision. Similar commissions would be created in the regions. Care should be taken to see that ‘the ethnic composition of these official commissions does not give grounds for chauvinistic agitation’. For this reason, although he chaired it, Trotsky, a Jew, was not an official member of the central commssion.

It was decided to develop the broadest possible agitation and to create a split in the Church by giving support to the so-called ‘Living Church’, or Renovationist wing, which opposed Tikhon's alleged refusal to give famine relief. The campaign was to be carried out in the shortest possible time and followed by the arrest of prominent clergy. During the confiscations, troops, Communists and special-purpose personnel should remain in the vicinity of the given church.¹⁴¹ The pillage had barely begun when Trotsky informed Lenin: ‘The main work of removals up to now has taken place in abandoned monasteries, museums, repositories and so on. The booty is enormous, but the work is far from finished.’¹⁴²

The trial in Shuya was set up at lightning speed. A session of the Politburo of 22 March had decided that ‘we should state that the arrest of the Synod and the Patriarch was necessary, not now but in fifteen—twenty-five days. The facts about Shuya should be published, the accused Shuya priests and laymen should be tried within a week. The ringleaders of the rebellion should be shot.’¹⁴³ Unshlikht insisted on the immediate arrest of the Patriarch. In a GPU note to the Politburo, it was stated that: ‘Patriarch Tikhon and his pack … are carrying on open operations against the removal of church valuables … There is sufficient evidence to arrest Tikhon and the most reactionary members of the Synod. The GPU finds: 1) the arrest of the Synod and patriarch timely; 2) The selection of a new Synod should not be allowed to proceed [the existing one had been arrested]; 3) Any priests who oppose the removal of valuables should be sent to the most starving districts of the Volga as enemies of the people.’¹⁴⁴

In an effort to step up the rate of the confiscation, the Politburo allocated five million roubles to the commission to pay for more ‘technical assistance’.¹⁴⁵ Many of the commission's new assistants were ex-convicts who had done time for armed robbery.

Throughout the country military-style expeditions were mounted against churches and the clergy. Jewish synagogues, Muslim mosques and Roman Catholic churches were not spared. At night, in the cellars of the Cheka or in nearby woods, the dry crack of revolver-fire could be heard. Executed priests and laymen were piled into gullies and ravines. The church bells fell silent throughout the land. Local Party leaders, Chekists and commission members hastily counted the gold and precious objects as they stuffed them into boxes.

The total quantity of valuables collected is unknown, but the contents of one list of items collected up to 1 November 1922 provides an idea of the scale of operations: 1220 pounds of gold, 828,275 pounds of silver, 35,670 diamonds, 71,762 items of unspecified valuables, 536 pounds of gemstones, 3115 gold roubles, 19,155 silver roubles, 1902 ‘various precious objects’. ‘In addition to the church valuables listed above, 964 antique objects were collected and will be valued.’¹⁴⁶ Once in Moscow, the boxes were sorted before despatch to the State Repository: part of the loot was put at the immediate disposal of the Politburo for the Comintern fund, for the needs of the GPU and ‘state construction’, while only a small part was allocated for the purchase of food. The Politburo ordered that a substantial amount of the material collected should remain in the regions for use by local authorities. Much of it was allocated to the needs of the Party hierarchy: thousands of houses requisitioned from the bourgeoisie in the Moscow area were now embellished with confiscated furniture.

The pillage reached beyond Church treasure to sacred objects. For instance, P. Krasikov, a Justice Commissariat official concerned with Church affairs and a close associate of Lenin, reported from Kostroma that the silver tomb containing the relics of St Barnabas of Vetluga should be confiscated: ‘The opening [of the tomb] should be done with the definite intention of removing these so-called relics. If major complications are expected, the GPU should be informed at once.’ The Politburo approved the removal of the tomb,¹⁴⁷ and Lenin ordered the Justice Commissariat to issue a decree on ‘the liquidation of the relics’.

St Barnabas was only one victim of the treasure-hunters' zeal. The same treatment was meted out to the relics of St Sergius of Radonezh, the fourteenth-century Church leader who embodied the Russian spirit of resistance to the Tatars, and in whose memory the very centre of the church at Zagorsk was named. Krasikov wanted to make a propaganda film of the exhumation of St Sergius. Patriarch Tikhon begged and protested against this sacrilege, but in vain. Similarly, the eleventh-century Monastery of the Caves in Kiev, one of the Church's holiest places, was pillaged. The local Ukrainian commission wanted to retain the treasure under the guise of relief for children, but the order immediately came from Moscow: confiscated valuables must be handed over to the central authorities, and only twenty-five per cent retained ‘for the children’.¹⁴⁸

Lenin meanwhile was hastening the trial of the senior clergy, and in early May the Politburo ordered the Moscow tribunal, ‘1) to put Tikhon on trial at once, 2) to sentence the priests to death.’¹⁴⁹ It had been hoped to carry out the trial with all despatch, but an international protest was raised: telegrams were sent by the Pope, by German socialists and Swedish pacifists, and by Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer/politician whose chief occupation was now as the League of Nations' High Commissioner for Refugees. The Politburo decided to postpone the trial and prepare its case more carefully. The Party's chief atheist, Yaroslavsky, proposed that if Tikhon were to repent, he could be sent to the Balaam church hostel and allowed to engage in Church work.¹⁵⁰

Meanwhile, on 8 May the trial of the Shuya priests and laymen was concluded, with the death sentence for eleven of them and various terms of imprisonment for the rest. Of the pleas for clemency addressed to the Politburo, six were granted and five rejected. Those who were executed joined the list of the many thousands already shot without trial.

On 8 October 1922 Tuchkov, the GPU ‘curator’ of Church affairs, head of the 6th department of the secret section of the GPU, reported to the Politburo:

On the Tikhon question. A group has been formed of the so-called ‘living church’, consisting chiefly of ‘white clergy’ [i.e. married priests, as distinct from monks, who were known as ‘black clergy’], and this has given us the chance to cause a quarrel between the priests and the bishops, like soldiers against generals, for there was hostility between the white and black clergy. We are working to push the Tikhonites out of the patriarchate and the parishes. We are creating groups of ‘adherents of renovationism’. Following the priest Krasnitsky's speech in the Church of Christ the Saviour, twelve laymen joined the group.¹⁵¹

Tikhon, imprisoned in Donskoi Monastery, was being subjected to the standard treatment: interrogation, threats, pressure and bribes. The interrogations went on even after Lenin had lost his faculties, as his instructions on Church affairs continued to be carried out to the letter. In the summer of 1923, the Politburo accepted Yaroslavsky's proposals: ‘1) That the investigation of the Tikhon case be continued until further notice; 2) That Tikhon be informed that his sentence could be altered if: a) he makes a statement of repentence of his crime against the Soviet regime; b) recognizes the court; c) distances himself from White Guards and other counter-revolutionary organizations; d) declares a negative attitude towards the Catholic Church. If he agrees, he will be freed.’¹⁵²

Before this, however, the GPU's ‘Renovationists’ had held their Second All-Russian Assembly and voted to remove Tikhon from his holy orders, a move he and his entourage repudiated as illegal. His GPU handlers, however, had by now done their work, and on 16 June 1923 the Patriarch signed a declaration, manifestly written or dictated by them. It read:

From Patriarch Tikhon, Vasili Ivanovich Belavin, being held under guard. Raised as I was in a monarchist society and before my arrest being under the influence of anti-Soviet persons, I was decidedly hostile to the Soviet regime … my hostility at times going over into active deeds, for instance, an address on the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, anathema of the authorities in that year, and, finally, an appeal against the removal of church valuables in 1922. With a few amendments, all of my anti-Soviet actions are detailed in the sentence of the Supreme Court. While recognizing the court's decision in bringing me to justice as correct, I wish to make the following statement: I repent of these crimes against the state order and I ask the Supreme Court to alter my sentence, that is, to release me from custody. Furthermore, I declare to the Supreme Court that henceforth I am no enemy of the Soviet regime. I utterly and decisively dissociate myself from the White Guardist counter-revolution both abroad and at home.¹⁵³

Several months elapsed before the Politburo reacted to Tikhon's statement, and on 18 March 1924, that is, after Lenin's death, it was decided to close the case.¹⁵⁴ Tikhon died only a year later, under virtual house-arrest, a broken man. His death was announced by the head of the OGPU secret section, Deribas: ‘On 7 April 1925 at 23.45 Patriarch Tikhon died from an attack of angina pectoris in the Bakunins’ Hospital at 19, Ostazhenka, while being attended by Doctors E.N. Bakunina and I.S. Shchelkan and his own attendant Paskevich. The burial took place in Donskoi Monastery.'¹⁵⁵ Lenin's instructions had been clear: ‘the more reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie are shot … the better’, and ‘the priests must be sentenced to death’. Since it had proved impractical to execute Tikhon, the Cheka had had to find other ways of ensuring that the sixty-year-old Patriarch should not long survive his sojourn in their company.

The greater part of the money realized from the sale of the confiscated valuables went to the Party for its own purposes. The Central Committee combated the famine with the help of the American Relief Administration and the journal Bezbozhnik (Atheist). Bezbozbnikcatalogued the dark deeds committed by the Church, which it practically accused of having caused the famine. The Central Committee's commission for the separation of Church and state instructed each of its members to ‘write not less than two articles a month for the journal’.¹⁵⁶

The Church neither forgot the massive blow Lenin had dealt it, nor recovered from it. Instead of functioning as a Church, it became a decorative embellishment of the state—to keep the West quiet—deprived of spiritual freedom and infiltrated by agents of the GPU. Its tribulations were not over, however, and the pillage was to continue for a long time to come. Decapitated and disfigured, from the start of collectivization the Church was kept on a short leash by the Bolsheviks. Point 8 of the Politburo order of 30 January 1930 on ‘Measures to liquidate kulak farms in districts of full collectivization’ reads: ‘The legislation on religious communities should be urgently revised to ensure that the leading organs of such communities (church councils, sectarian communes and so on) cannot under any circumstances become kulak strongholds. The Orgburo is ordered to issue a directive on the closure of the churches.’¹⁵⁷

On the initiative of the Council of Labour and Defence, and with Politburo approval, the removal of church bells began. Every year a plan was launched calling for the collection of a specific quantity of bronze. On May 1933, for instance, the Politburo confirmed that, ‘with the aim of securing bell bronze for the tractor industry, the annual plan for bronze should be increased from 5200 tonnes to 6300 tonnes’, and the amount to be collected region by region was given.¹⁵⁸

The churches were gradually closed. Cathedrals were deserted. Disfigured buildings, their cupolas stripped and dismantled, stood forlornly on their hillocks, silent and doomed. Occasionally, to be sure, from the depths of the desecrated religious consciousness, perhaps out of sheer desperation, a rebellious protest sparked.

In September 1938, Deputy People's Interior Commissar Beria reported to Stalin that the Nekrasov District Party Committee of Yaroslavl oblast had taken the decision to close the church in the village of Chernaya Zavod and to remove its bells. The district chiefs arrived, a crowd gathered, shouts rang out of ‘Guard!’, ‘Robbers!’, ‘The drunken bandits have come!’ The Church authorities put a twenty-four-hour guard round the church. Stalin, without even reading the whole document, scribbled a note on it: ‘Comrade Malenkov, Please check up and report. Arrest the organizers.’¹⁵⁹

On the eve of the Second World War, the regime hastened to take control of the newly annexed territories in Western Ukraine, Moldavia and the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. All were well known for their religious observance. In October 1940, Khrushchev, Secretary of the Ukrainian Party Central Committee, sent a report with a request to Stalin: ‘According to ancient Jewish tradition, for ten days a year God takes stock of every Jew's actions in the previous year … For nine days the Jews pray to God and ask forgiveness for their sins. They are forbidden to work during this time. On the tenth day, the “Day of Atonement”, which in 1940 falls on Saturday 12 October, the Jews never work … The Secretary of the Lvov District Party Committee, Comrade Grishchuk, has received many requests from inhabitants of Jewish nationality for permission not to work in factories and institutions on Saturday 12 October. I request instructions on how to proceed.’ On 11 October, one day before ‘zero hour’, Stalin, in a rare moment of comparative religious tolerance, magnanimously ordered: ‘Let them not work. Tell Khrushchev.’¹⁶⁰

Rule over the new diocesan provinces was established, naturally, by means of the secret services. As an illustration of the process, the following report was received by Stalin in March 1941 from B. Merkulov, People's Commissar for State Security of the USSR:

There are at present in the territories of the Latvian, Estonian and Lithuanian republics autocephalous [autonomous] Orthodox churches, headed by local metropolitans who are placemen of the bourgeois governments.

In the Latvian SSR there are 175,000 Orthodox parishioners. Anti-Soviet elements, former members of the Fascist organization ‘Perkanirust’, are grouped around the head of the Synod, Augustin.

In the Estonian SSR there are 40,000 Orthodox. The head of the eparchy has died. Archbishop Fedosi Fedoseev, who heads an anti-Soviet group of churchmen, is trying to grab the job.

The NKGB has prepared the following measures:

1) Through an NKGB agency we will get the Moscow patriarchate to issue a resolution on the subordination of the Orthodox churches of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania to itself, using a declaration from local rank and file clergy and believers for the purpose.

2) By a decision of the Moscow patriarchate we shall appoint as eparch Archbishop Dmitri Nikolaevich Voskresensky (an agent of the NKGB of the USSR), using for the purpose appropriate requests from the local clergy, which are to be found in the Moscow patriarchate.¹⁶¹

This document clearly demonstrates the reasons behind Lenin's confident assertion that ‘our victory over the clergy is fully assured’. So complete, indeed, was that victory that even Stalin and his accomplices were at times at a loss to know if someone was a priest or an NKGB agent in a cassock. While boasting loudly of freedom of conscience and quoting copiously from Lenin's hypocritical statements on how humanely socialism treated religion, the Bolshevik regime, through the widespread use of violence, had turned the dwelling-place of the spirit and faith into a den of thought-police.

In July 1937, the Politburo ordered the raising of ‘all taxes on priests as persons receiving unearned income’. And churches and monasteries were in addition taxed in kind—grain, potatoes—as though they were private farms.¹⁶² These measures virtually stifled the last vestiges of the parishes. Just before Stalin's death there were no more than 12,499 priests left in the USSR.¹⁶³ The Church had been killed off as if by a plague unleashed by Lenin. His record in anti-Church affairs is monstrously impressive: soon after the October revolution came the closure of the monasteries, then the attempt to split the Church, the exhumation of relics, and finally the confiscation, the pillage of Church holy objects and the mass physical annihilation of the clergy.

The post-war condition of the Church is depicted in a memorandum dated July 1953 to Khrushchev from Karpov, the Chairman of the Council for Orthodox Affairs, under the Council of Ministers. Karpov reported that 19,000 inactive churches had survived total destruction and removal. Of these, 13,000 were being used as warehouses, the rest as clubs and industrial workshops; about 3000 had retained their religious equipment, but were under lock and key and not used for services. Karpov went on to say that ‘the Council's many years of practice have established that when the buildings of inactive churches are left standing or even when they are used for undesignated purposes (as warehouses, etc.), and the question of their refurbishment is not raised, we see no great activity from groups of believers, but as soon as there is any question of refurbishing or removing the building of an inactive church, the activity begins’.¹⁶⁴

The disaster of the Russian Church was not entirely the work of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, although they were certainly responsible for the culmination of the tragedy. The Orthodox Church in Russia had traditionally been in the hands of monarchs, its independence illusory. The Church at times simply identified itself as a part of the monarchy, a fact which partly explains the deep crisis the Church experienced after 1917. The collapse of the autocracy rendered the Church at once impotent and defenceless. The rapid decline of the Church in Soviet Russia created a sudden vacuum in the public mind, into which the myths of materialism were pumped. Atheism was an important component of the new state religion, Bolshevism, and generations were raised in the new faith, in a spirit of class antagonism and an absence of faith in the eternal values which the Church had always upheld.

The Prophet of Comintern

23 July 1920 was a typical day, full of tension and problems, and Lenin, neither ill nor resting, was working alone in the Kremlin. But the main event later that evening was to be the meeting of the Second Comintern Congress, which he would chair.¹⁶⁵ He could envisage the growth of revolution in other countries, the creation of new Communist Parties, the rise in international support for the great cause he and his Party had begun. Already the blood-red banner was being raised in many capitals. Only three years earlier it would have seemed an impossible, fantastic idea, although in July 1918, in an article entitled ‘Prophetic Words’, he had written: ‘No one believes in miracles anymore, thank God. Miraculous prophecy is a fairy-tale. But scientific prophecy is a fact.’¹⁶⁶ The approaching world revolution was no fairy-tale. For Lenin it was a fact that was about to happen.

Inspired by the Comintern Congress that had just opened in Moscow, by reports from outside and his own analysis of the world situation, and above all by the Red Army's march towards Warsaw in the opening Soviet campaign of the war with Poland, that evening Lenin sent a coded cable to Stalin in Kharkov: ‘The situation in Comintern is splendid. Zinoviev, Bukharin and I, too, think it is time to encourage revolution in Italy. My view is that for this to happen, Hungary must be sovietized, and maybe also the Czech Lands and Romania. This has to be carefully thought out. Send your detailed conclusions. The German Communists think that Germany is capable of mobilizing 300,000 riff-raff against us.’¹⁶⁷

By this time the decision had been made, as Trotsky put it, ‘to take the risk, on Lenin's initiative, of feeling out bourgeois-landowning Poland with the bayonet’.¹⁶⁸ In September of the same year, Lenin would put it more frankly: by attacking Poland ‘we will help the sovietization of Lithuania and Poland’ and the revolutionizing of Germany. To be sure, in his political report to the Ninth Party Conference, he warned: ‘I would ask you not to take too many notes: this must not get into the press.’¹⁶⁹ But even failure in Poland, he concluded, must not stop them: ‘It will teach us about offensive war.’ ‘We will help Hungary, Italy, and at each step we will remember where to stop.’¹⁷⁰

All this was an effort to fulfil Lenin's own prophecy. He believed in world revolution, though he did not care to expatiate on his failures. The campaign against Poland (and the onward march of the Red Army to the German frontier in order to revive the revolution there) was undertaken on Lenin's initiative and his determined insistence. He never publicly spoke of the fact that his decision ended in the humiliating defeat of the Red Army at Warsaw in September 1920. Under the terms of the Treaty of Riga, signed by Soviet Russia and Poland in March 1921, Russia lost western territory containing nearly four million inhabitants, and was required to make substantial financial restitution to Poland. When the time arrived for the first instalment of the compensation, Moscow decided to pay it in the form of precious stones, having first raised their nominal value several times. Warsaw was furious, and the Foreign Commissar, Georgy Chicherin, informed Lenin:

On 1 November 1921 we were obliged to pay and ought to have paid Poland ten million roubles in gold and diamonds. The diamonds we handed over were valued by Polish experts at 2.5 million gold roubles. We have no more stones ready to hand over. The Pole Olszewski warns that finding us out in such a monstrously false valuation would be widely exploited in the press … we would be monstrously compromised.

Another solution would be to pay the difference at once in gold, but it is too hard to throw away 7.5 million in gold. Another way would be to start collecting the rest in stones. We have a lot of stones, but they are not sorted or valued … We haven't got the people … The former head of the loan bank, Levitsky, is in prison. Alexandrov, the valuer, is also in prison. We need a decision of the Politburo to accommodate them in normal conditions.¹⁷¹

Lenin agreed, but seems to have suffered no pangs of conscience over the Polish adventure. He was as unconcerned by the loss of millions of roubles of the country's wealth as he was by the pointless loss of thousands of lives, all sacrificed to satisfy his revolutionary whim.

In the summer of 1917, while hiding from the Provisional Government, Lenin had deluded himself into fixing a time for the arrival of Communism.¹⁷² Two years later, on 1 May 1919 at Red Square, he declared: ‘Most of you here who are not older than thirty to thirty-five will live under Communism.’¹⁷³ Eighteen months later, he was no less sanguine as he wound up his speech to the Third Congress of Communist Youth: ‘The generation that is now fifteen will in ten to twenty years from now live in a Communist society.’¹⁷⁴

Soviet Marxism has traditionally and invariably described Lenin as a prophet, and claimed that the twentieth century developed ‘according to Lenin’, thereby proving him a genius. Yet neither Soviet historians nor philosphers ever officially confronted the fact that not one of his epoch-making predictions has ever come true. Not one. The end of capitalism? Nobody can take it seriously. Many ‘capitalist’ countries, moreover, have developed more ‘socialism’ than Lenin ever imagined possible. If Marx were to rise again and visit, say, Stuttgart, and Chita in Eastern Siberia, and were then asked where he found more ‘socialism’, his answer would be plain enough: there is more social provision in the capitalist West than was ever given to the Soviet people. The idea of the creation of a World Soviet Federation has died quietly, in conditions entirely different from those prophesied by Lenin. To be sure, he himself declared that ‘any attempt to calculate future opportunities with complete accuracy is either charlatanism or hopeless pedantry’.¹⁷⁵

As a theorist, Lenin was profoundly contradictory, a fact for which his successors were silently grateful, since they were always able to find the appropriate quotation, the ‘Leninist proof’, to support a diametrically opposite line to the one they had just been defending. Lenin could predict with certainty that ‘socialism will shorten the working day, raise the masses to a new life, create conditions in which everyone without exception will carry out “state functions”’,¹⁷⁶ and not long afterwards assert that ‘we do not claim that Marx and the Marxists know the path to socialism in all its detail. That's nonsense.’¹⁷⁷ Thus, while his utterances were a rich seam for his successors to mine, considerable judgment had to be exercised in deciding what was ‘a wise precept’ and what was ‘nonsense’.

The fullest expression of Lenin's prophetic rêle was in relation to the question of world revolution, a matter to which he devoted unprecedented effort. A world revolution, however, needed a world instrument. Apart from the Russian Communist Party, in Europe only Germany could boast another such party, those in other countries still being in a relatively embryonic stage. Lenin ordered his Foreign Commissar, Chicherin, to broadcast an invitation to all Communists in Europe and Asia to assemble for a conference in Moscow in March 1919. Chicherin's summons received a weak response, as there was hardly anyone to take notice of it: a few prisoners of war remaining in Russia and some foreign nationals attended, and Hugo Eberlein came from Germany to represent the German Communist Party. For nearly a week this small group, barely exceeding thirty in number, debated. They decided that ‘the international Communist conference would create the Third Communist International’, known henceforth as Comintern. Seventeen delegates, most of them completely unknown and chosen more or less at random, signed the manifesto, and Lenin set them their task: to struggle for the world dictatorship of the proletariat.

From its inception, this body became a cover and a tool of the Russian Communist Party's activities in the international arena. Appointed president of the new organization, first by the Politburo and then ‘confirmed’ by the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI), Zinoviev claimed time and again that the victory of Communist revolution in Europe was guaranteed, and that the Red Flag would soon be flying over all continents. He saw his primary task as helping to ferment armed uprisings wherever ‘the revolutionary situation was ripening’. When it proved impossible to do this, however, as for instance in Germany in 1921, when strikes and attempts at armed uprising petered out for lack of effective Communist leadership against a determined government, the putsches and plots ended in complete disaster. While the German police and troops were rounding up scattered conspirators, Zinoviev was in Moscow, shouting from the platform: ‘Arm yourselves, German proletarians! Wherever you can get hold of a gun, take it! Form soviets! Build a Red Army! Long live the proletarian revolution in Germany and the whole world!’ And he was trying to convince the Politburo that ‘the leaven of world revolution’ was already at work in the main capitalist countries.

The Central Committee, meanwhile, was preparing the programme for new parties, formulating the ‘Twenty-one Conditions’ for admission to Comintern,¹⁷⁸ and sending trunkloads of gold and other valuables to Germany, Italy, Hungary and elsewhere in order to foment revolution. The Bolshevik leadership believed fanatically that, the torch of revolution having been lit in Russia, the ancient edifice of civilization would soon be engulfed in flames and burn to the ground like an old wooden barn.

On 6 March 1920, at a ceremony marking the first anniversary of the founding of Comintern, Lenin gave a ‘guarantee that the victory of the Communist revolution is inevitable … and that it is not too far off’.¹⁷⁹ Don Quixote, tilting at windmills, and Khlestakov, Gogol's fantasist, were scarcely more short-sighted or irresponsible. The Bolsheviks planned not merely to control but also to create revolutionary situations through Comintern. For this purpose, from the very beginning, Lenin had to shift the entire financial burden of the ‘international Communist Party’ onto the shoulders of plundered, starving, half-stifled Soviet Russia. As early as 8 October 1918, Lenin and the Central Committee had created a Russian Communist Party Bureau for ‘foreign work’, consisting of Balabanova, Vorovsky, Bukharin and Axelrod.¹⁸⁰ This enabled him to say in May 1919 that the Third International had really been created in 1918, when parties in a number of countries had needed coordinating.¹⁸¹ The fact was, as Ioffe wrote, that ‘the wager on world revolution, even if plainly delayed, was the keystone of Lenin's entire tactics during Brest-Litovsk and after’.¹⁸²

All financial operations were conducted through the Bureau, under Zinoviev, although the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs also exercised a degree of patronage. Comintern affairs were, however, removed from the Foreign Commissariat by the Politburo when Zinoviev complained to Lenin of Chicherin's ‘rivalry’, and the Bureau acquired financial independence. It was, of course, subordinate to the Bolshevik Central Committee, and this financial dependence made Comintern an obedient tool of Bolshevik plans. The Politburo determined practically everything: where and when Comintern congresses should take place, what should be on their agenda, and such trivial questions as whether Karl Radek, who was in charge of Bolshevik relations with foreign Communist delegations, should be given twelve extra rations ‘for the needs of the delegates’; Abel Yenukidze, Nikolai Sklyansky and Efraim Bryukhanov were charged with ‘taking the feeding of participants in hand’, improving supplies for the workers in Comintern's printing press, and many other similar routine matters.¹⁸³

From the start, Comintern had close links with the GPU, which created Soviet intelligence abroad. Contacts were established with Comintern sections, operations were financed, personal papers prepared, personnel recruited. The administrator of the Comintern Executive Committee, a certain D. Blake,* wrote to the Politburo on 24 November 1920 ‘on illegal techniques’, raising the question of his committee's lack of foreign notepaper, photographic paper and related materials. Among other things, he also mentioned that ‘technical personnel and their families should be looked after with secret funds from Comintern’. Before passing Blake's note on for attention, Lenin wrote on it: ‘On conspiracy—Blake's report. Secret.’¹⁸⁴

The national sections of Comintern, that is the non-Russian parties, had the task not only of recruiting new members and producing propaganda, but also of organizing strikes, demonstrations, protest marches and uprisings wherever possible. Under the cover of Comintern, the Politburo succeeded in creating a number of bases abroad. For instance, its representative in Turkestan wrote to Karakhan, a Deputy Foreign Commissar, to ask the Politburo: ‘1) Whether it would sanction the formation of an Indian base in Turkestan, in collaboration with the Central Committee's own Turkburo; 2) To whom am I to transmit the 2 million gold roubles?’ Lenin's answers to these questions were given orally, and only his signature, in red ink, appears on the document.¹⁸⁵ Until Comintern had its own proper budget—and it would soon be funded by both the Central Committee and the OGPU for its own secret operations—most decisions on financial matters were made personally by Lenin.

For example, Ivan Rahja, the Finnish Bolshevik who had helped to hide him in the summer of 1917, and who was now one of the leaders of the Finnish Communist Party, asked Lenin for ten million Finnish marks' worth of valuables for his party's use. Lenin agreed.¹⁸⁶ From Bengal a letter came via Chicherin asking for money and literature to help overthrow the British Raj: ‘I would ask you to convey my greetings to all the brave comrades who so valiantly struggle for the liberation of mankind: Lenin, Trotsky, Chicherin. Signed Virendranat Chattopadia.’ The Eastern Section of the Foreign Commissariat noted on this document: ‘If we are seriously thinking of revolutionizing India, we should bank on the non-Muslim population … As for the funding Ch[attopadia] talks about, he has undoubtedly been corrupted by European life, having been kept for a long time on German money.’¹⁸⁷ There were many such ‘revolutionaries’ in need of Russian money, and many who received it.

Moscow was handing out money to all kinds of people, millions of gold roubles, dollars, pounds, marks, lire, crowns and so on, all raised by selling off the tsarist gold reserves, the valuables looted from the churches and confiscated from the bourgeoisie. It seems that ECCI kept no proper accounts of the financing of its illegal operations. In this connection, it is interesting to note the correspondence between Stalin and Zinoviev, on the one hand, and Litvinov, then Deputy Foreign Commissar, and Osip Pyatnitsky, who was in charge of ECCI's hard-currency chest, on the other. At issue was the money which had ‘run away’ through the fingers of one of the Foreign Commissariat's emissaries, Carlo, real name Lyubarsky. It seems that Carlo had handed over to the Italian Communist Party only 288,000 of the 750,000 lire he had been given, while also managing to mislay some 124,487 Czech crowns and a large amount of British pounds. Litvinov wanted him sentenced, but Pyatnitsky thought it enough to fire him.¹⁸⁸ It is safe to assume that there were many such people who were using the revolutionary ardour of the Bolshevik leadership to line their own pockets.

Lenin did not merely prophesy, he did all in his power to make his prophecies become reality. Efforts were made, especially in a number of Asian countries, to radicalize Comintern's influence. Karakhan proposed, for instance, the regular despatch of agitators who would be paid fixed bonuses. It seemed that these agents, while fighting for Communist ideals, preferred to receive their reward in a material rather than moral form. Karakhan wrote to Lenin: ‘The proposal is to allocate 200,000 [roubles] for the first quarter of the year, January to March 1919, to the Foreign Commissariat for supporting Asian labour organizations and sending agitators to make propaganda in Asia. The cost of each agitator, plus his bonus when he returns, would be as follows: North Korea and Korea—10,000 roubles; South China—20,000 roubles. Similar missions are envisaged for Persia and India.’¹⁸⁹ Thus, before Comintern was founded, it was the Foreign Commissariat that was responsible for spreading revolutionary ideas.

Lenin wanted to incorporate Bolshevik principles in Comintern from its inception. Having seized power in Russia with a relatively small force, he thought that a centralized and disciplined party on a worldwide scale would make his prophecy of world revolution come true. At his behest, Trotsky wrote the Manifesto for the Second Comintern Congress, which Lenin approved. The style was typical of Trotsky:

We must kill imperialism so that the human species can survive … Belated German parliamentarism, an abortion of the bourgeois revolution, which is itself an abortion of history, suffers in its infancy from all the illnesses of an old dog … The Communist International is the international party of the proletarian uprising and proletarian dictatorship … The Soviet system is a class apparatus which in the struggle and by means of the struggle will lay waste to parliamentarism and replace it by itself …¹⁹⁰

In these few phrases Trotsky expounded the aims and strategy of Bolshevik international policy. Their easy victory in October 1917 had induced euphoria and the conviction that they could reach their goals by any available means.

The rêle of the army and armed force in revolution played an important part in Bolshevik thinking about how to initiate world revolution. In May 1924, Trotsky addressed the Red Army Academy on the need to prepare for civil war in peacetime. A ‘statute of civil war’ must be drawn up which would take two factors closely into account: first, armed invasion from without and civil war within, and secondly, constant reference to Leninism, which according to Trotsky determined the political circumstances of the struggle.¹⁹¹ Even though he was aware that the revolution was in retreat by 1924, he nevertheless urged that the movement should be ready for the coming battles.

While the Eighth Party Congress was in session in March 1919, the formation of the Hungarian Soviet Republic was announced. The Congress erupted in ecstasy and asked Lenin to send its greetings to Budapest, which he gladly did: ‘Our Congress is convinced that the time is not far off when Communism will be victorious throughout the world … Long live the international Communist Republic!’¹⁹²

Less than a month later came another joyful announcement, this time that a Communist government had come to power in Bavaria under Eugen Leviné, and that it had at once begun carrying out the urgent measures required by the proletarian dictatorship: nationalization of the banks, creation of a Red Army, introduction of the eight-hour day, arming the workers, isolating the bourgeoisie. Lenin's message this time was more in the nature of an instruction: ‘have you armed the workers, disarmed the bourgeoisie, doubled and tripled the wages for farm-labourers and navvies, confiscated all paper and all printing presses … packed in the Munich bourgeoisie to make room for the immediate rehousing of workers in wealthy apartments … taken hostages from among the bourgeoisie … mobilized the workers to a man, both for defence and ideological work in the outlying villages?’¹⁹³

Lenin was convinced the European revolution had begun, and he was most concerned that it should occur above all in Germany. As Trotsky was to write: ‘Soviet Germany united with Soviet Russia would at once be stronger than all the capitalist countries put together.’¹⁹⁴

Meanwhile, Comintern emissaries were travelling about Europe and elsewhere, their suitcases stuffed with hard currency and various treasures. Angelica Balabanova, the Secretary of Comintern, recalled that soon after the revolution she was despatched to Stockholm to set up links with left-wing organizations in Europe:

Ships arrived in Stockholm every Saturday. They brought me … large quantities of money which I deposited in a bank. [My] office did not require such large sums, and the purpose of these transfers was incomprehensible to me … I felt ill at ease and I took every opportunity to ask Lenin for explanations and instructions … I received the following letter from Lenin: ‘Dear Comrade Balabanova, Excellent, excellent [underlined three times, a habit of Lenin's to lend special emphasis], you are our most capable and deserving collaborator. But I beg you, don't economize. Spend millions, many many millions.’

When eventually Balabanova managed to speak to Lenin, he explained that there had been a misunderstanding. He had taken her to be a good revolutionist, even though not a Bolshevik, and assumed she approved his methods: corruption and slander to undermine opponents and dissenting organizations. She resigned forthwith, but obviously could not go public, which meant the Bolsheviks could continue to use her name.¹⁹⁵

Lenin meanwhile was sending telegrams to all the places he regarded as hot spots: ‘To Bela Kun in Budapest: Please let us know what concrete guarantees you have that the new Hungarian government will really be Communist, and not merely socialist, i.e. composed of social traitors?’¹⁹⁶ In May 1919 he addressed the Hungarian Communists through Pravda, warning them that they must ‘be firm. If the socialists who joined you yesterday, or the petty bourgeoisie, start to waver, crush their hesitations mercilessly. Shooting is the only legitimate recourse for a coward in war.’¹⁹⁷ These Jacobin injunctions may have terrified the Hungarian and Bavarian Communists more than they encouraged them, but for Lenin the sound of shooting in the cellars of Budapest and on German waste land was a sign that the revolution was being ‘confirmed’ in those countries.

His declaration to Hungary at the Eighth Party Congress that ‘the working class of Russia is hastening to your aid with all the means at its disposal’ was no empty gesture. Money and propaganda literature were sent, and there were attempts also to send arms. In May Podvoisky in Kiev informed Lenin that he had begun forming an international division to help Hungary.¹⁹⁸ Lenin at once ordered the urgent despatch of money to assist this initiative.

While units were being prepared for shipment to Hungary, Russia was enduring mayhem, and the army itself was unstable. Excerpts from Cheka reports on the political situation in Ukraine between 1 January and 15 May 1919, in precisely the area from which units would go to Hungary, indicate the degree of chaos reigning there:

Berdichev: Attack on Cheka. Armoury burgled. Vasilkov: Uprising in town. Crushed by armoured train and 300 troops. Shpola: The local garrison is arresting people, searching and slaughtering the population. Kazatin: Red Army men of the 4th Nezhin Regiment have dispersed the Cheka. Oseter: Uprising in village of Novo-Glybovo and Svorota. Crushed by Cheka unit. Four men killed. Starodub: Uprising in village of Vitelin, crushed by unit of 400 men. Twenty killed. Krolevets: Uprising in village of Antonovka. Crushed by Cheka unit. Ten ringleaders shot.

And so on almost endlessly, including occasions where artillery had to be used, and where, as in Gomel, the Soviet authorities were put to flight.¹⁹⁹

The Bolsheviks hung onto power only by the use of relentless terror, driven by the urge to carry the civil war as fast as possible to other countries. It was their firm conviction that their supporters abroad would only come to power by the use of force and terror. In the Manifesto of the Second Comintern Congress, this was clearly stated: ‘The Communist International cannot admit those organizations which, while including the dictatorship of the proletariat in their programmes, continue a policy plainly aimed at the peaceful resolution of the historic crisis.’²⁰⁰

In countless speeches, the Bolshevik leaders stressed armed uprising and the need to bring armies over to their side, and they attempted to pursue this policy along the entire periphery of Soviet Russia. As their hopes for Hungary faded, they turned their attention to the East. Trotsky wrote: ‘In the European sphere of world politics, our Red Army will turn out to be of rather modest size, both for offensive and defensive purposes … The position is quite different if we turn to face the East … The road to India might seem more passable and shorter for us at the present moment than the one to Hungary.’²⁰¹ He went on to advise that a powerful military base be established in the Urals from which to revolutionize the East. He predicted that ‘Asia could become the arena of early uprisings’ and therefore the Soviets should prepare for an assault on India via Afghanistan, and he ordered Field Commander Lebedev to deliver ‘the necessary military supplies to Afghanistan’.²⁰²

Meanwhile, it was important not to neglect Persia, which had only recently seemed to be ‘going Red’. Fedor Raskolnikov, the regional Red Army commander, had reported to Moscow, on returning from Enzel, that the situation in Persia was indescribable: ‘The entire people greeted us with extraordinary enthusiasm. At first, red flags were to be seen in only a few places, but now the whole town is covered with them. The Persian Cossacks have told us they are at our disposal. I arrested the Russian officer in charge of them and appointed one of our own people in his place … I request your instructions concerning future policy in Persia. Should I consider myself at liberty to move deeper into Persia if a revolution takes place and a new government requests help from us?’²⁰³

The Persian affair soon came to a standstill. Efforts were made to save the revolution there. Central Committee emissary Abukov wrote asking for urgent help to be sent to Moscow's ally, Mirza Kuchuk: ‘Help is needed in arms, gold, silver … So far Kuchuk is in control of only two towns … Raskolnikov has promised him official recognition … We await proper help …’²⁰⁴

Proposals were pouring in about where to go next: revolutionary action was urged in Korea, China and India. In August 1919 the Chairman of the Kalmyk Executive Committee, Chapchaev, suggested sending armed units to India ‘from the other side’, i.e. through Mongolia and Tibet. Money and gold would be needed, and the units should also take arms to distribute to the local population. As cover, they should disguise themselves as a scientific expedition. Lenin immediately ordered that concrete measures be undertaken to carry out these suggestions.²⁰⁵

Lenin was more cautious with a Korean delegation that requested an audience. He told Comintern leader Matyas Rakosi—a refugee from the already defeated Hungarian Soviet—to receive the delegation and report back.²⁰⁶ The Koreans wanted Moscow to give direct aid to them in their struggle against the Japanese. Chicherin was opposed: ‘We shall not throw down a challenge to the Japanese. Of course, we bear a grudge against them; of course, we can and should give covert aid to the Korean partisans. But there should be no open, still less, demonstrative action on our part.’ Lenin noted on the report: ‘Comrade Molotov, I agree with Chicherin completely. No open, still less, demonstrative action. More in secret. Give this instruction as from the Central Committee.’²⁰⁷

As Russia writhed in starvation, civil war and disease, millions of gold roubles were disappearing into the sands of the world revolution. As we have seen, much of it went by haphazard channels, while Lenin received equally casual reports on the sale of valuables. It was not until September 1921 that the Politburo created an ECCI budget commission, comprising Zinoviev, Solts and Molotov, with Mikhailov as Molotov's deputy.

Lenin took a close personal interest in the financing of organizations and individuals abroad. In November 1921 P.I. Stuchka wrote asking for his help in fixing the budget for the Latvian Communist Party, ‘as the issue has been dragging on since 1 August and our comrades are not getting anything, except a refusal.’ Lenin noted: ‘Comrade Molotov, This red tape is shameful. Prepare the question for Thursday's meeting of the Politburo.’²⁰⁸

An excerpt from the Comintern budget commission's meeting of March 1922 gives an idea of its workings:

1.                 Budget for the German CP: Brandler, Popov, Humbert-Droz and Pyatnitsky voted for a grant for 1922 of 446,592 gold roubles (42,872.832 German marks); Solts and Molotov voted 400,000 gold roubles.

2.                 Budget for French CP: unanimous vote for a grant of 100,000 gold roubles (638,000 French francs).

3.                 Budget for Italian CP: 360,842 gold roubles or 4,306,000 lire.

4.                 Budget for Czechoslovak CP: (Humbert-Droz having left) Popov, Brandler and Pyatnitsky in favour of 250,000 gold roubles (7,910,000 Czech crowns), Solts and Mikhailov for 200,000.

5.                 Budget for English CP: unanimous vote for 200,000 gold roubles.²⁰⁹

The list goes on.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks supported all the parties that accepted the Comintern's programme and conditions. Regular payments topped up the coffers of the Communist Parties of the USA, Poland, Austria, Switzerland, Sweden, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Luxemburg, Holland, Greece, Turkey, Persia, India, China, Korea, Japan, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Argentina, Italy, South Africa, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Norway and elsewhere. The Comintern commission also distributed large sums to international youth organizations, Communist trade unions, publishing houses and other bodies, with the most frequent contributions going to Germany. Fixed budgets were supplemented by extra payments, as Moscow on the whole satisfied the constant flood of requests. The money committed by the session cited above alone amounted to some 5,536,400 gold roubles, a huge sum. According to the available data, in that year the Politburo spent no more than a third of that sum on feeding the starving people of Russia—and the river of gold for Comintern, be it noted, would continue to flow for a long time to come. Moscow was to be especially generous in the post-war period, paying out huge amounts, of which the following list is only a small part (all figures in US dollars): in 1945, to Bulgaria (Kostov)—$100,000; in 1946, to China (Chou En-lai)—$50,000; to Romania (Gheorgiu Dej)—$500,000; in 1947, to Greece (Zachariades)—$100,000; in 1948, to France (Thorez)—$258,350; to Italy (Secchia)—$40,000; to Holland (Groot)—$50,000; to Greece (Zachariades)—$100,000.²¹⁰

From the revolution onwards it became common practice for Soviet diplomats, representatives of various kinds and ‘plenipotentiaries’ to demand from the Kremlin more and more funds to revolutionize the political process abroad and to consolidate Soviet Russia's position in different countries. In January 1920, for instance, Ioffe, who had aspired to manage the revolutionary process in Germany in 1919, wrote to Chicherin complaining of the waste: ‘Having overpaid Estonia by 15 million, we'll send the money back extremely quickly.’ He reminded Chicherin that ‘when Kolchak carried off more than 800 million of our gold roubles, we hardly winced … I saw the way our agents in Lithuania and Belorussia are throwing away millions …’²¹¹

In April 1922, the Politburo approved Comintern's budget, and the order signed by Stalin was duly sent to the Finance Commissariat for action.²¹² As we have seen, however, the official budget was only a part of total expenditure, as constant requests for further payments were met out of the ‘reserve fund’, the Politburo fund and the OGPU's budget. Thus, Karakhan reported to Stalin in April 1922, the very month when the budget had been fixed, that on behalf of the Foreign Commissariat he had transferred two payments of 600,000 gold roubles and four million roubles in tsarist notes to the Koreans, to help them establish printing presses in Shanghai and Peking, and to help with their underground work against the Japanese in Korea, including organizing for an armed uprising.²¹³ (For several years, the Politburo continued to use tsarist paper money for its secret operations in the East.)

Lenin waited impatiently for some result to come from all these financial inputs, but in vain. Soon after the budget commission was formed, report after report began to come in of corruption, embezzlement and the disappearance of large sums of Comintern money. Safarov reported to Stalin that money and valuables were being handed over ‘to irresponsible people from different groups’, and cited the case of 200,000 gold roubles having been given to a certain Jun Hu-nam and Lee Ko-chi to support the national movement in Korea, whereas the money was in fact used to keep the squabbles alive among the various Korean émigré organizations in Manchuria.²¹⁴

Concerned to tighten up the organization, Stalin wrote a personal note to Zinoviev asking him to explain just what ‘this Frankfurt fund’ in Germany was. Who was financing it? What for? Zinoviev, who did not know, promised to find out when Pyatnitsky and Fotieva turned up.²¹⁵ It transpired that Comintern's financial affairs in Germany were being handled by one James (Yakov) Reich, known in the Party as ‘Comrade Thomas’, into whose hands Moscow was placing vast sums. For the German Communist Party's armed uprising of February 1921 alone, some 620,000 gold roubles, in currency and valuables, was transmitted. And for the whole of 1921 Comrade Thomas disbursed 1.22 million gold roubles in Germany, of which he retained some 500,000 under his control in the ‘Frankfurt fund’.

When Pyatnitsky looked into Comintern's finances, the mysterious Comrade Thomas could not account for several million marks.²¹⁶ A female Comintern operative who worked in Thomas's organization later recalled: ‘The money was usually kept at Comrade Thomas's apartment. It was in trunks and suitcases, cupboards and occasionally in thick files, left lying on his bookshelves or behind books. The money was doled out in our apartments late at night in cardboard boxes weighing as much as ten to fifteen kilogrammes each.’²¹⁷ When a commission, established by Stalin and headed by Krestinsky, was unable to find any receipts for some very large sums, it was decided that ‘no further matters connected with financial operations should be entrusted to Comrade Thomas’.²¹⁸ It later transpired that ‘Comrade’ Thomas was not even a member of the Communist Party, but was simply someone who had happened to find himself working in Comintern's financial organization in a rather important position.

At the end of the year, a Politburo commission consisting of Trotsky, Kuybyshev, Pyatnitsky and Sokolnikov, requested a further 2,196,500 gold roubles for ‘additional subsidies to parties’. While he was constantly demanding executions for saboteurs, speculators and black marketeers, Lenin was utterly incapable of bringing order to the financial operations of his own organization. He simply scattered money abroad, in the vain hope that it would water the seeds of his ideas. Yet in November 1921 he published an article, entitled ‘On the Importance of Gold’, in which he could write: ‘The RSFSR must look after its gold, it must sell it dearer and buy goods cheaper with it.’²¹⁹ This was not the first time Lenin said one thing and did another.

Only once, it seems, did Lenin explode when told of the loss of a large amount of Comintern money. He wrote a ‘draft of a secret Central Committee letter’ which, among other things, said: ‘There is no doubt that the financial aid Comintern gives to the Communist Parties of bourgeois countries, while of course perfectly legitimate and necessary, sometimes leads to disgraceful conduct and disgusting abuse.’ He then listed the Party punishments for the robbery, concealment and appropriation of Comintern money, ranging from a reprimand to removal from post, expulsion from the Party and often arrest—and demanded detailed accounts of ‘every kopek spent’.²²⁰ A naive hope, indeed.

Comintern's expenses came under more strict control during Stalin's rule, and their purposes were more precisely defined. For instance, the French writer Henri Barbusse came to Moscow and declared that he intended writing a book on Stalin. Naturally, Moscow wanted to encourage him, and an ‘advance’ of 40,000 francs was paid.²²¹ This was not a large sum, but Barbusse would be much more lavishly ‘encouraged’ when the book appeared in 1936. When Georgy Dimitrov, Comintern's last general secretary from 1935 to 1943, wanted to fix the budget, he had to go to Stalin, who was by then disillusioned with Comintern and was prepared to give only enough to maintain the organization. Foreign parties were now subsidized exclusively through the NKVD, bypassing Comintern. Thus, while ECCI's budget for 1937 was submitted to Stalin—12,048,028 in hard (unspecified) currency and 18,658,762 Soviet roubles—the NKVD's expenses on Comintern were being processed under special heads, for what was at stake was no longer a Party affair, but espionage and terrorism.²²² Comintern was now more useful to the NKVD as a human resource for diversionary operations in capitalist countries than it was to the Communist movement. International Communism, to be sure, remained a lever of Soviet foreign policy, but it was a weak lever, since everyone knew what was going on behind the scenes.

When it became clear that the world revolution was not immediately going to follow the Russian revolution, the Bolsheviks started looking for new allies. Unexpectedly, a tempting situation presented itself. In January 1922 the leaders of the Socialist International—known as the Two-and-a-Half, i.e. neither the old Second Socialist nor Third Communist International—proposed holding an international congress of all three Internationals, with the aim of coordinating the joint struggle of the working class against international reaction. The Politburo discussed the issue at a long session, during which Lenin expressed the hope that they would manage to exert their influence on the other two organizations. The leaders of the Second International, however, with their long and often bitter experience of the Bolsheviks and their leader, knew perfectly well how things would go.

Lenin did not hide his intentions: ‘If there are still people … who don't understand that the tactics of a united front will help us overthrow the leaders of both … Internationals, then they need to attend more popular lectures and discussions.’²²³

At a joint conference, the leaders of the non-Bolshevik Internationals demanded the legalization of the Menshevik Party in Russia, an end to the execution of SRs, and so on. A commission was formed to convene the congress, but it met only once. Lenin was sharply critical of the ‘indulgence’ shown by the Comintern delegation, led by Radek, and described the agreements as ‘political concessions to the international bourgeoisie’. Western social democrats realized that for Lenin the term ‘cooperation’ meant nothing other than subordination to Comintern, and the whole initiative fizzled out.

Both the West and the East had long known what Comintern stood for, and much had been said and written about it. On 26 April 1928, therefore, Stalin and the Politburo resolved that visible signs of the direct dependence of Comintern organizations on Soviet state organs must be avoided at all costs. Bukharin and Pyatnitsky were instructed to devise a covert way of making it seem that money paid to foreign parties came not from Moscow, and not through Russian hands, but from Berlin (Zapburo—Western Bureau) and Irkutsk (Vostburo—Eastern Bureau), ‘in any case via foreign comrades’. This was soon taken in hand by the NKVD, though hardly anyone was deluded, but it meant that the NKVD (and its military intelligence arm) became ever more ‘organically’ integrated into the fabric of Comintern.

One of the most notorious such cases was that of Richard Sorge. Born in 1895 in Baku on the Caspian Sea to a German father and a Russian mother, Sorge grew up in Germany, served in the German army in the First World War and, along with numerous other refugees from the failed Communist revolutions of Central and Eastern Europe, became a Comintern operative in Moscow in the 1920s. In 1929 he was transferred to Soviet military intelligence and sent abroad as a journalist. From Shanghai between 1929 and 1932, and then from Tokyo between 1933 until his arrest by the Japanese in October 1941, he sent highly valuable reports back to his masters in Moscow. Yet, like so many competent and audacious operatives, whether working for Comintern, the NKVD or military intelligence abroad, Sorge became enmeshed in the web of murderous intrigue that was being woven in Moscow in the middle of the 1930s.

In the process of building up a case against Bukharin and Radek, and to bring down Jan Berzin, the former head of military intelligence, and Pyatnitsky, the head of the Communist Trade Union International, a former military intelligence agent called Valin-Gailis was arrested in the summer of 1937. In his deposition of 19 August 1937 he was made to say that Sorge was ‘undoubtedly a German or German—Japanese agent’. According to Valin's confession, Stalin had already in 1936 seen through Sorge and had cautioned that he was sending German disinformation to Moscow. Valin described much of Sorge's information as routine material that could have been gleaned from the daily press. A drunk and a womanizer, in Valin's words, Sorge was the boon companion of Colonel Ott, head of German intelligence in Tokyo, in whose company he blabbed too much. As a result of Sorge's provocative behaviour, it was claimed that Berzin had to close the Tokyo agency, thus terminating a most valuable source of foreign intelligence.²²⁴ In this way, Berzin could be accused of sabotage by means of a conspiracy with one of his chief agents.

Despite the fact that all the main targets of the conspiracy were liquidated in 1938, Sorge himself managed to remain in Tokyo and to continue sending his reports. In January, March and May 1941 he reported to Stalin that Hitler was preparing to invade the USSR, and then on 15 June 1941 gave the precise date. Whether Stalin ignored his warnings because he regarded him as a tainted source, or because they did not conform to his own agenda, is a question that need not detain us. In any event, Sorge and his entire network were arrested in Tokyo in October 1941 and tried in 1942. Sorge and one other were sentenced to death, ironically on charges of spying for Comintern, and the sentence was duly carried out by hanging, again ironically, on 7 November 1944, the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. Sorge's wife was arrested by the NKVD in September 1942 in Moscow and exiled for five years to Krasnoyarsk in Siberia, also as a spy. On 28 May 1943 she died, allegedly of a brain haemorrhage, at the age of thirty-eight.²²⁵

Soon after Lenin's death, Comintern had been turned into an obedient and expeditious adjunct of the special services. For instance, when it was necessary to remove Zinoviev, Stalin gave the order to ‘organize support’. At once, statements of approval of the Central Committee's recall of Zinoviev as chairman of Comintern, and the liquidation of his post, began pouring in from the ‘independent Communist parties’. The first to respond was the faithful Communist Party of Germany, which declared that it ‘unreservedly supports the Central Committee Plenum's order and calls upon the Party mass to struggle fiercely against the new opposition … It regards Comrade Zinoviev's deviation from Leninism as incompatible with his further remaining at the head of the International.’²²⁶ In November 1926 Zinoviev was relieved of his post, which once upon a time he used to think of secretly as the presidency of the World Socialist Federation. Stalin found him a new job as ‘a member of the presidium of Gosplan to watch over the activity of the cultural administration commissariats’.²²⁷

By the eve of the war Comintern was vegetating, as Stalin had become progressively more doubtful about its potential, and only the NKVD still derived some benefit from it as a pool of new recruits for foreign intelligence. Dimitrov was reduced to begging tearfully for funds to maintain the apparatus. In 1937 he had confirmed a budget of twenty-one million roubles and 3.5 million gold roubles in hard currency, but in 1938 the budget was reduced to a third of that sum.²²⁸ In January 1924, while Lenin was still just alive, the allocation had been more than a hundred times this. Stalin became increasingly cool towards Comintern, until finally and with little regret he disbanded Lenin's brainchild in 1943.

Stalin had changed his view of the world revolution. The aim of turning the planet red was still in place, but the methods for achieving it needed to be reviewed. When the time came to kill it off, Comintern's disappearance was barely noticed. On 31 October 1941, Dimitrov wrote to Stalin:

Dear Comrade Stalin,

With the transfer of ECCI to Ufa [in the Urals], a number of questions relating to the legal position of our institution arise. Is it wise, given the present situation, for everything to be done under the flag of Comintern, or wouldn't it be better if we went on existing in Ufa as a different organization? I personally think there is no need at present to over-emphasize Comintern. It would be better to do all the work under the name of a different firm, for instance, ‘The Institute for the Study of International Questions’ …²²⁹

By now ‘the international party of proletarian revolt and the proletarian dictatorship’ had become a pale shadow of Lenin's grandiose idea, and was in fact nothing more than Stalin's pawn. Before Dimitrov could fly ‘for a couple of days … to Ufa and Kuybyshev to my organization’, he had to beg humbly for Stalin's permission.²³⁰

To be sure, in 1947 Stalin would try once more to resurrect Comintern as Cominform (Communist Information Bureau), but that, too, proved a fruitless exercise. He had even gone as far as to propose creating the post of General Secretary of Cominform and offering it to Palmiro Togliatti, the Italian Communist leader. The response was an unexpected refusal, polite but firm:

Dear Comrade Stalin,

I have spent a long time considering the offer of the post of General Secretary of Cominform. It is very hard for me to express an opinion which does not coincide with your own. But it seems to me that the Italian Communist Party cannot agree to the proposal …

Togliatti then listed seven points, intended to provide decent motives for his refusal.²³¹ What he omitted to give, however, was the main reason: namely, that he had stopped believing in Lenin's Utopian world revolution years before. No one had spoken of it aloud for a long time. It had simply become bad form to do so.

It is extremely doubtful if even Stalin still believed in the success of the world revolution. Of all the leaders of the October revolution, only Trotsky could still claim (six months before he was murdered in 1940): ‘My faith in the Communist future of mankind is no less fervent, and is even stronger than during my youth.’²³²

Stalin was holding to a different course. Step by step, tearing away one country after another from the old world, using plots and violence, subtle calculation and cunning, he exploited the consequences of the Second World War to consolidate his totalitarian dictatorship. He continued to swear by Lenin, who had been of such enormous value to him for over thirty years, but he was well aware that Lenin's plan openly to storm the capitalist citadel had been Utopian. The ‘first Leninist’ preferred the tactics of the long siege. He was also more cautious than Lenin about making predictions, especially about when the Russian people would see Communism in their country.

* Vera Figner was the grand old lady of terrorism of the 1870s and 1880s. She was condemned to death in 1884, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and she remained for twenty years in the Schluesselberg Fortress in St Petersburg. Released in 1904, she was briefly an SR, but devoted most of the rest of her life to women's causes. She died in Moscow in 1943, aged ninety.

* An organization, founded by Bolsheviks and supported by Lunacharsky as Commissar for Education (Public Enlightenment), to encourage the artistic and creative endeavours of the workers in a Communist spirit, but also autonomously. It effectively represented a pluralist trend in Bolshevism and its fate was therefore highly significant as an indicator of things to come.

†  MAPP: Moscow Association of Proletarian Writers. VAPP: All-Union Association of Proletarian Writers. RKP: Russian Communist Party.

* Not the notorious ‘doctors' plot’ of 1953, but the lesser-known events of 1922.

* Evidently an alias. It has proved impossible to establish his identity.