38 Lenin and Stalin

Karl Marx had predicted that the revolution heralding the victory of communism would begin in his native Germany. With its large industrial proletariat, Germany fulfilled the conditions he regarded as necessary for the next great stage in the class struggle—the overthrow of the bourgeoisie.

Marx would never have believed that the first successful communist revolution would take place in Russia, a backward land that was only just emerging from centuries of feudalism.

What Marx had not foreseen was the ease with which the working classes could be seduced by nationalism. When war broke out in 1914, millions of men abandoned working-class solidarity and volunteered for the slaughter. In Russia the tsarist regime handled the war with particular ineptitude, causing suffering on an unimaginable scale. It was this situation that the communist revolutionary Vladimir Ilych Lenin set out to exploit when he returned to Russia from exile in 1917.

The road to revolution While many European states moved toward democracy in the 19th century, imperial Russia remained an autocracy: “Every country has its constitution,” quipped one Russian; “ours is absolutism moderated by assassination.” Repression provoked radical opposition, such as the Decembrist revolt of 1825, and the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Alexander had tried to introduce a modicum of modernization, for example by emancipating the serfs in 1861, but his successors, Alexander III and Nicholas II, turned their backs on reform, regarding themselves as divinely sanctioned fathers of their people.

Nicholas II attempted to assert Russian power in the Far East, leading to a humiliating defeat in the Russo–Japanese War of 1904–5. Defeat and general discontent prompted the Revolution of 1905, marked by massacres of peaceful demonstrators, uprisings, mutinies and a general strike. The tsar agreed to the formation of a duma, or parliament, and then, having brought moderate opinion over to his side, proceeded to crush the revolt. Some reforms followed, but Nicholas was indifferent to the appalling conditions in which the emerging urban proletariat lived and worked.

Life for the workers and peasants was made immeasurably worse by the First World War. As Nicholas took command of the armed forces, Russia suffered reverse after reverse, and government at home was left in the equally incapable hands of the Empress Alexandra and her right-wing circle. By 1917, military casualties exceeded 8 million, and a million more men had deserted. The peasants stopped sending produce to the cities, leading to food shortages. On March 8, 1917 (February in the old Russian calendar) revolution broke in Petrograd (St. Petersburg). Soldiers and workers formed a soviet (council), and other soviets sprang up elsewhere. The tsar ordered the Petrograd garrison to suppress the revolt, but the garrison mutinied, and on March 15 Nicholas abdicated. A moderate provisional government was set up, but the soviets represented a significant alternative center of power.

“In such a country it was quite easy to start a revolution, as easy as lifting a feather.”

V. I. Lenin, addressing Seventh Congress of the Bolshevik Party, March 7, 1918

The Bolshevik coup On April 16, Lenin arrived in Petrograd from exile in Switzerland. Lenin was the leader of the Bolshevik (“majority”) faction of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, which had split in 1903. The Bolsheviks believed a single, small group of professional revolutionaries could and should lead the revolution to a successful conclusion. The Menshevik (“minority”) faction, in contrast, believed that a mass party needed to be built before the revolution could take place.

As soon as he arrived in Petrograd, Lenin called for a transfer of power from the provisional government to the soviets. The failure of the provisional government to end Russia’s involvement in the war or to implement land reforms or end food shortages fueled unrest. The Bolsheviks gained a majority in the Petrograd soviet, and in November (October in the old Russian calendar) staged a revolution and seized power.

The establishment of the Soviet Union The new government made peace with Germany, signing a peace treaty in March 1918. The Bolsheviks were then faced with an internal civil war, in which the Red Army, led by Leon Trotsky, fought the anti-Bolshevik Whites. Despite pro-White military interventions by various Western powers, the Red Army was victorious by 1920, and in 1922 the Bolsheviks, having reconquered many non-Russian parts of the old Russian empire that had declared their independence, proclaimed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

From Red Terror to Great Purge

In 1918 Lenin let loose the Cheka (secret police) against his political opponents in a process called the Red Terror. His use of arrest, execution and confinement of suspected enemies in a “Gulag” of labor camps, where many more died in appalling conditions, was expanded under Stalin. During the collectivization of agriculture, the entire class of kulaks (rich peasants) was eliminated, with millions of deaths; millions more died in famines in Ukraine and Kazakhstan in 1932–4. Stalin then turned his attention to real or suspected enemies within the minority nationalities, the army and the Communist Party itself—including many veterans of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, who were tortured into publicly admitting their “guilt” in a series of show trials in the Great Purge of 1936–8. In all, tens of millions were shot, exiled or sent to labor camps—while Stalin made himself the object of a cult of personality, and kept a steel grip on power.

In the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin had ordered the break-up of the old estates and the redistribution of land to the peasants. But the exigencies of the civil war obliged him in June 1918 to introduce “War Communism,” under which the state nationalized industry, appropriated private businesses and requisitioned food from the peasants. Productivity collapsed, and there were serious food shortages. This resulted in disaffection and protests, such as the 1921 mutiny at the Kronstadt naval base. In response, Lenin introduced the “New Economic Policy” (NEP), which restored a measure of free enterprise and made concessions to peasants and consumers. As the economy recovered, so did the grasp on power of the Communist Party (as the Bolsheviks were now known).

“One death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic.”

Joseph Stalin, attributed remark

Lenin’s death in 1924 led to a power struggle, chiefly between Trotsky and Joseph Stalin. Stalin proved to be the more ruthless operator, and in 1927 Trotsky—who had wanted to spread the revolution across Europe—was expelled from the party and went into exile. Stalin embarked on a policy of “socialism in one country,” abandoning the NEP and introducing a series of five-year plans, which involved a massive acceleration in industrialization and the repossession of land from the peasants, who were forced to work on collective farms. In the process millions upon millions died, as Stalin stamped himself on the USSR as absolute dictator, a position he was to hold until his death in 1953.

the condensed idea

Russia exchanged one tyranny for another