LECTURE 8

FROM LENIN TO STALIN

1. TO THE LENIN MAUSOLEUM: THE MUMMY'S TOMB

Western liberalism emphasizes pluralism: the representation and accommodation of diverse points of view. Lenin was never willing to share power, or to alternate in power with other political parties. To be sure, there were diverse points of view within the Bolshevik party, but Lenin would not tolerate them. He ridiculed dissenters and eventually banned them. Leninism stood for the monopoly of power, intransigence, and ruthlessness in the service of the Party's historic mission. This is not to say that Lenin did not change his mind, or that he did not seek advice from different sources. But in principle Leninism implies a single correct course of action, defined by the Party. And this basic principle made possible the rise of Stalin, who took advantage not only of the ideology Lenin created and the institutions he bequeathed, but even of Lenin's dead body. When Lenin died prematurely after a series of strokes, Stalin arranged for the great man's body to be mummified. Leninism became a cult, with Stalin as its chief priest.

But even before Stalin rose to power, what Leninism amounted to in practice was a party-state that progressively absorbed all the principal forms of social and economic life. In his book State and Revolution, Lenin announced: "to organize the whole national economy on the lines of the postal serviceƒ all under the control and leadership of the armed proletariatÜthis is our immediate aim." A whole society organized along the lines of the postal service hardly seems an attractive vision to us! In any case, for Lenin the "armed proletariat" and the Party were identical: that equation, false as it was, is the essence of Leninism. The Party monitored the "soviet" bureaucracy from behind the scenes: "soviet" power was a fa*ade for a centrally controlled party that pulled all the strings. This was not at all what most revolutionary workers and peasants had in mind when they acquiesced in the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917.

2. FROM REVOLUTION TO CIVIL WAR

As we have seen, the Provisional Government that formed in February/March 1917 quickly forfeited popular support because it persisted in fighting the war and because its reforms fell behind the rising expectations of hungry city crowds and landless peasants. Lenin, on the other hand, promised "peace, bread, and land," and "all power to the soviets." Peace Lenin provided by signing the harsh Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Germans in March 1918. The Treaty detached eastern Poland, the Ukraine, Finland, and the Baltic provinces from Russia, but Lenin assured his followers that the spread of revolution across Europe would soon make the Treaty obsolete. Lenin delivered on the promise of land for the peasants by acknowledging the land seizures that had taken place since March 1917. A decree of 26 October 1917 abolished all private land ownership without compensation, and called on rural land committees to redistribute the land to the peasants on an egalitarian basis. Another popular decree, in November, gave elected factory committees the power of supervision over industrial and commercial enterprises. But bread was harder to provide, and by January 1918 Lenin was suggesting that the Petrograd Soviet should send out armed detachments to find and confiscate grain, and that they should be empowered to shoot those who resisted.

Could the new regime, under better circumstances, have developed a genuine "people's democracy" on the bases of soviets, and committees of workers and soldiers and peasants? Probably not. In any case, "whatever may have been the Bolsheviks' intentions when they came to power, there can be no doubt that during the civil war they withdrew or nullified most of the benefits they had given to the people in October, while submitting the democratic institutions they had helped to create to rigid and often brutal control from above" (Geoffrey Hosking). Even before the civil war, on 2 December 1917 a Supreme Council of the National Economy was set up "to elaborate general norms and a plan for regulating the economic life of the country" as well as to "reconcile and coordinate" the activities of other economic agencies, among them the trade unions and factory committees. Here already was a recipe for total control of the economy from the center and from above.

On 7 December the Cheka was organized to combat looting, profiteering, and hoarding and to keep watch on opponents of the regime. It soon proceeded from mere investigation of counterrevolutionary crime to the arrest of suspects, and from there to staging trials and carrying out executions. Soon it became unnecessary for an actual crime to be proven against any person of non-worker or non-peasant origin. One Cheka official instructed his officers in November 1918: "We are not waging war against individual persons. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. During the investigation, do not look for evidence that the accused acted in deed or word against soviet power. The first questions that you ought to put are: To what class does he belong? What is his origin? What is his education or profession? And it is these questions that ought to determine the fate of the accused. In this lies the significance and essence of the Red Terror."

Here again there are echoes of the great French Revolution with its Law of Suspects and its positive evaluation of "terror" as a weapon against the people's enemies. By mid-1921 the Cheka was over a quarter of a million strong. By the following year it was operating a network of camps with 60,000 inmates, and there had been something like 150,000 executions. During the first years of Soviet power, the regime succeeded in physically destroying or driving out of the country the greater part of the "bourgeois intelligentsia," the professionals and experts who form the managerial core of a modern economy.

The Cheka had mushroomed in size during a period of civil war. The Whites were remnants of the Tsar's army who began to attack the Bolshevik regime in the summer of 1918. The Germans made mischief for the Bolsheviks by supporting a conservative Cossack government on the periphery of the country where the Whites could organize. A country torn by civil war served German interests in 1918. In the following year the Western Allies intervened on behalf of the Whites, sending aid and detachments to White forces in the far east and north of the country. Western intervention enabled the Bolsheviks to believe that they were fighting not just against domestic enemies but against the combined forces of world imperialism.

The Reds won because (1) they controlled the center of the country, and had the advantage of interior lines of communication; (2) because they had, in Trotsky, a commander and organizer of genius; (3) because the peasants distrusted the Whites, their former landlords, even more than they distrusted the Bolsheviks; and (4) because insofar as the Whites had an ideology, it was Russian nationalism, which offended the minorities on the periphery of the country. Moreover, (5) the Allies' support was insufficient to make a decisive difference, but enough to open the Whites to the charge of being unpatriotic and encouraging foreigners to intervene in Russian affairs.

The civil war brought enormous suffering in its wake. Millions died from bullets, famine, and epidemicÜfar more than in the First World War. Five million died in the famine of 1921, and some scholars estimate the "excess mortality" of the period as high as fourteen million. By 1921 industrial production was at about a fifth of its 1913 level, and money had almost disappeared, replaced by a primitive barter economy. Food production declined as well, and the trading and transport systems necessary to deliver grain to the cities had broken down. Between 1917 and late 1920 the number of factory workers in Russia declined from around 3.5 million to barely over a million, and the populations of the great cities plunged. Some observers joked bitterly that far from creating a "dictatorship of the proletariat" the regime had created a dictatorship without a proletariat.

But if the proletariat had withered, the upper echelons of Russian society had nearly disappeared. And into the void stepped the cadres of the rapidly expanding Party. From 115,00 members in January 1918, the Party grew to 775,000 in March 1921, a sixfold increase in three years. The Party was becoming an organization of the upwardly mobile, an employment agency for the newly literate. And Stalin, as the Party's General Secretary, would control its patronage, an enormous source of influence and power in the years after Lenin's death.

3. KRONSTADT

The Reds won their civil war, but they lost the allegiance of a good part of what was left of the working class. In 1921 strikes broke out in Moscow and Petrograd: workers called for free trade in grain and the abolition of the privileges and extra rations enjoyed by Party officials. Their political demands reflected the influence of the semi-legal Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, who were calling for freedom of speech, press, and assembly, and the restoration of free elections to factory committees, trade unions, and soviets. The Party declared martial law in Petrograd, but meanwhile the unrest spread to the nearby naval base of Kronstadt, whose sailors had a revolutionary tradition dating back to 1905. Now they too were calling for new and secret elections, and for soviets without Bolsheviks. The uprising, crushed by Trotsky, took place while the Tenth Party Congress was in session. Lenin made economic concessionsÜthe beginning of his New Economic Policy Übut cracked down on political dissent within the Party itself. A resolution on party unity banned "factionalism": "The Congress orders the immediate dissolution, without exception, of all groups that have been formed on the basis of some platform or other, and instructs all organizations to be very strict in ensuring that no manifestation of factionalism of any sort be tolerated. Failure to comply with this resolution is to entail unconditional and immediate expulsion from the party."

Here was a major turning point: the regime had violently repressed its own principal base of supporters, who were calling for a measure of democratic control. And the Party, having already long ago eliminated competition with other political parties, now abandoned disagreement within its own ranks. It was a moment of disillusionmentÜperhaps not the first, and certainly not the last.

4. STALIN AND NON-CHARISMATIC LEADERSHIP

We have said little about him so far, for the very good reason that he played a minor part in the Revolution. Insecurity about his role in those heroic times is certainly one of the factors that led him eventually to murder so many of Lenin's principal lieutenants. His military record during the civil war was full of blunders. He longed to be a hero, like Lenin, but his own record in the time of revolution and war was far from impressive. One of the most brilliant Bolsheviks, Bukharin, understood that Stalin was psychologically driven to feel enviously vengeful toward all who surpassed him in qualities or capacities in which he considered himself to be pre-eminent. His hero-image of himself was in symbiosis with his villain-image of his enemies. Yet this extraordinarily vindictive and cruel man liked to present himself as a benign father-uncle.

His father was an alcoholic village cobbler in Georgia and his mother was a pious woman who placed her rebellious son in a seminary where he studied Marxist rather than religious texts. One of his biographers, Robert Tucker, suggests that "the ideology he adopted [Marxism] legitimized his resentment against the various forms of established authority, identified his enemies as history's, bestowed higher meaning on his urge to live a life of combat, and sanctified his quest for vindictive triumphs." Aggression and vindictiveness are certainly among the principal traits of his character. His many prison experiences were not exactly character-enhancing either.

In 1917, Stalin was Lenin's special assistant for delicate assignments requiring conspiratorial skills, and for jobs that no one else wanted. He also became a specialist on the question of "nationalities" in what would become the "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics." Kronstadt made it clear that the very "masses" who were supposed to be the principal supporters of the regime were in fact hostile to it. It is very significant that it was this period that saw the rise of Stalin. For he was a master of both the carrot and the stick: jobs for the upwardly mobile and loyal, repression (or worse) for dissidents and rivals. It was Stalin who took on the difficult task of modernizing a country where the proletariat had been depleted and disenchanted, and specialists were distrusted as class enemies. He promoted thousands of mediocre men from the provinces who owed their careers to him and sided with him against more talented figures such as Trotsky and Bukharin.

Stalin has emerged from the civil war with little glory and much power; Trotsky finished with much glory and little power. Stalin would use power to trump glory: he offered the Bolsheviks non-charismatic leadership, although he continually invoked the sacred authority of the safely mummified Lenin in its support.