Keys of This Blood (35 page)

Late in November, 42 million people voted in the only free elections Russians have ever been allowed. Lenin's party, the Bolsheviks, polled 24 percent of the vote. The non-Marxist Social Revolution Party emerged with a solid 58 percent. Lenin would have none of it. “We made the mistake,” he said, “of promising that this talk shop [the Constituent Assembly] would open up … but history has not yet said a word about when we will shut it down.”

Lenin quickly made up for history's lack.

Before Lenin's ring of steel closed down all hope, one soviet deputy, S. A. Sorokin, faced the Bolshevik leader with the enormity of his crime. “Now,” he screamed at Lenin in public session, “when the great dream [of a truly constituent assembly of free Russians] is about to come true, you dally with the idea of a Bolshevik Paradise. You refuse to do your duty…. By clinging to this mad delusion, you will reap its certain fruits: starvation, tyranny, civil war and horrors which you cannot even imagine.”

Sorokin's was the prophetic voice of blame not only for that first crime against the great Russian dream, but for all of Russia's subsequent ills and all its subsequent crimes against humanity. For Lenin's “mad delusion” of the violent destruction of all things past, and of absolute power in his own hands, held him fast. The smashing of the Constituent Assembly by an armed minority was purely and simply the first essential step.

Sorokin was only one of many critics. The ablest theoretician among the Bolsheviks, Lev Bronstein (he changed his name to Leon Trotsky), also disagreed with Lenin. He summed up Lenin's action in a single sentence. “The simple and open and brutal breaking up of the Constituent Assembly dealt formal democracy a blow from which it never recovered.” For Trotsky, Lenin had betrayed both Russia and the Communist Party.

For Lenin, however, it made no practical difference that his cause had been trounced in the popular vote. It didn't even matter that there had been no Communist Revolution—no glorious uprising of the Russian people in a living expression of his proletarian dream. And certainly it did not matter that there had only been the unlawful and violent rape of national power by the armed bully boys of Lenin's failed Bolshevik Party. A coup would serve the purpose every bit as well in the end.

With power in his hands, there was a great deal for Lenin to do. Peace had to be concluded with European powers. The civil war between various factions within Russia had to be ended. The war had to be settled between Lenin's infant Bolshevik government and the various republics of Russia that did not want to join the Bolsheviks. The economic organization of the country had to be effected.

Over the five years that followed the Bolshevik coup, Lenin at least dominated those problems, even if he didn't solve them all. But by any standard the world might care to use, his greatest achievement by far was his creation of the worldwide institutional organization perfectly suited to the geopolitical attainment of his proletarian ideal. Into the building of that organization Lenin threw every skill he had acquired over the years: his logic, his oratory and his prestige. The ingrained traits of his character all came into play. Mercilessness and ruthlessness with his opponents. Lies. Betrayals. Deception. False promises.

Lenin moved quickly to organize his own deeply revised version of the destroyed Constituent Assembly—a pan-Russian Congress of Soviets, dominated by his Bolsheviks. Hardly had that been accomplished, than a Council of People's Commissars was drawn from the Congress and organized into a Sovnarkom, a Soviet government.

Through his Bolsheviks, Lenin exercised a keen control of the entire process of assembly, discussions and voting. To no one's surprise, therefore, he emerged as the Chairman of the Sovnarkom. He now had in his hands everything he needed by way of building blocks with which to erect the state that would be, in its very essence, the apt and ideal instrument for fomenting and managing every step of the coming worldwide proletarian revolution. The Big Lie had been born.

The constitution and makeup of any other state in his time and before him had been created, first, to render the lives of citizens secure and, second, to promote the public commonweal. That is what men for a long time had considered the aim of any state and government to be.

Lenin, however, had created the historical circumstances that allowed him to turn the entire formula on its head. The Russian people were the vanguard of a new era, and he was the vanguard of the people. The new state he intended to create was not primarily and essentially meant to function for the people. It would use the people for another and wider aim.

As early as 1901–2, in a pamphlet entitled “What Is to Be Done?” he had outlined what sort of a Russian state the proletarian revolution should produce as a transitional stage on the way to the final victory of the worldwide revolution. Russia as a people and as a government should be wholly and professionally devoted to fulfilling just two parallel roles:
the fomenting of that worldwide revolution, and the prevention of all subversion by counterrevolutionaries.

By nature and by definition, all capitalist states were counterrevolutionary, of course. This bedrock conviction supplied Lenin with a clearly defined category into which, infallibly and irrevocably, he placed every government except his own.

One and all, they were enemies of the proletarian revolution in Russia and elsewhere. One and all, they were out to betray, to spy upon, to subvert and to frustrate the proletarian revolution. One and all—by means of propaganda and, above all, by means of their intelligence services—they would bend their efforts to penetrate and honeycomb the Russian proletarian revolution with their own agents. And, one and all, the capitalist states and governments of the world continually suppressed and enslaved their own workers by means of foul propaganda; and thus they were preventing the outbreak of the revolution among the peoples of the rest of the world.

Worse still, it was not only capitalist states that were the enemy. By the very fact of being a capitalist—of making money through capitalism—any individual qualified as a spy, a saboteur, an intelligence agent of the enemy, an oppressor of the proletariat. If you had a shoe factory in Peoria, Illinois, or if you were a pork butcher in Bath, England, or if you drove your own taxi in Sydney, Australia, you qualified as a capitalist in a capitalist country. You were the enemy, and the day was almost at hand when you would be treated as such.

For Lenin, in other words, it was a foregone conclusion that the new Russia—the jealous child of the putative proletarian revolution—would have to be set up structurally and in the most practical terms as a counterintelligence state. It would have to be built to function in such a way as to prevent the penetration and subversion of the liberated Russian people by capitalist espionage, intelligence and propaganda agencies.

At the same time, the new Russia would have a sacred duty to help the proletarian revolution abroad to free itself from the suppression it was undergoing in all capitalist-dominated countries.

These were the only functioning values of the new Russian state, therefore. To counter capitalist intelligence and subversion at home. And to midwife the proletarian revolution in capitalist territory. Once those two aims were achieved, insisted Lenin, the worldwide revolution would take over, and then there would no longer be any need at all for government. The class struggle would be done and over. The people would be free.

Exactly how all that would happen, and what practical order of governance
would follow, were not immediately clear. Perhaps state and government would simply fall away universally, like so many leaves in winter; or perhaps they would have to be frozen into submission, defeat and death like unwelcome armies in the Russian snows.

In light of the brutal dictatorship he actually devised, it is remarkable that Lenin truly regarded all constitutional government—including his own infant Sovnarkom—as no more than provisional. It strains credibility that he could for a moment have thought that the wholesale revolution he envisioned and planned for the world would end the class struggle for all time, would relieve the proletariat of all burdens of constitutional government, and would establish the earthly “Paradise of the Workers.”

In any case, it was clear that Russia under Lenin would not be anything like an ordinary state.

For one thing, and true to the Leninist call, it would be a state totally under the control, and at the beck and call, of the dedicated Russian proletarian revolutionaries—the Bolsheviks—who were now grouped in the Leninist Communist Party (CP). The CP would be the state. The state would be the CP. The Party-State.

In the most basic and practical terms, Lenin had already done away with the state. Or at least he had made Party and State identical, coterminous with one another. So fundamental was this single factor to the house that Lenin built, that there is no understanding possible of the remarkable geopolitical structure he invented without an understanding of the total identity he forged between Party and State.

Admittedly, Lenin owed more than a bow and a doff of his hat to Marx, even in this. At the same time, like a settler building on land already pioneered and cleared for his use, Lenin imbued Marxist ideas with his own subtle thinking about the political form Marxism should take. And he brought to bear two talents Marx had lacked: a ruthless organizational ability, and long revolutionary experience. The result has rightly and accurately been called Leninist Marxism. Lenin spent the last seven years of his life, from 1917 to 1924, inventing and refining this global machine. It was and remains Lenin's bequest to the Russian people and to the wide world in general. And to Mikhail Gorbachev in particular.

In practice, Lenin carried his decision in favor of violent revolution to a fanatic and fantastic extreme. “Only force would produce social change,” he wrote without equivocation.

Logically, then, his first draft of a Soviet constitution in 1917 did not
provide for a legal and orderly transfer of power to the proletariat around the world, but for the global seizure of power by armed uprising. Lenin made sure that factor was a matter of bedrock law. The final and complete victory of the proletariat throughout Russia would be the irresistible signal for the workers of the world to sweep away all capitalists everywhere. Then, by Soviet law, all government would be abolished—would simply and immediately disappear from the face of the earth—and the “Workers' Paradise” would ensue.

While such a constitutional provision might resemble an unbirthday party in a proletarian wonderland, it did make clear to Lenin the exact nature of the structure he needed to build. For the first time in history, the Party—the ideological organ of political action—would become the essence and the soul of his new creation. The State would be no more than its outer body.

This new creation—the Party-State—would be the Leninist embodiment of the proletarian march through history, on the rampage against all those spies, intelligence agencies, propaganda machines and other capitalist oppressors of the world proletariat.

By definition, it followed that Lenin's first institutional priority had to be the reorganization—the re-creation, in fact—of the Communist Party. Henceforth, the CP would be composed exclusively of dedicated and professional revolutionaries, men and women virtually consecrated to Lenin's principle of armed and violent overthrow of all governments standing in the way of his worldly and worldwide Paradise. Consecration to principles was a beginning. It was essential, however, that there be a structure—one that would result in the successful creation of a Party-State; that is, a state in which Lenin's ideological Party would in every way be superior to and more powerful than any formal structure of government, because it would be the government.

To that end, Lenin organized his CP on the foundation of the dual “dictatorship”—Lenin's term—of a new organization: the Central Committee (CC) of the CP.

Though the CC would be a part of the CP, it would be so very much in the way that the heart is part of the body: that is, it would be superior to any other Party organ in crucial and specified ways.

The first crucial dictatorial role specified for the CC was in relation to the Party itself. As a practical matter, the handpicked members of the CC exercised control over the lives, the thinking and activities of all the CP's revolutionary members. Absolute and unremitting obedience to the CC was required from all. The purity of the Party in its revolutionary principles, in its proletarian goals, and in its worldwide mandate was thus guaranteed in Lenin's central revolutionary institution.

The second dictatorial role of the CC was to ensure the same degree of purity out among the proletariat at large. The obedient CP was, therefore, the only political party permitted. The proletariat would still have its soviets, or councils of workers' deputies. But all candidates for the deputy posts would be selected by the CP, which in its turn was answerable to the CC.

Lenin's arrangement was that, within clear limits, there should be “freedom of expression”—Lenin's term again—and of opinion within the CP and the proletariat. By design, however, the limits of such freedom were reached the moment the CC took a decision or declared its attitude on doctrinal or practical issues. Once that happened, everyone—CP and proletariat alike—owed blind obedience.

Lenin so organized the all-powerful Central Committee that it exercised its inward dictatorship over the Party, as well as its outward dictatorship over the proletariat, by means of three “sections” that Lenin devised for that purpose: the Secretariat, the Political Bureau, and the Organization Bureau.

The function of the second section, the Political Bureau, was to be the surveillance arm of the Party-State, to monitor and maintain ideological correctness and purity in the political structure of the Party and the State.

It fell to the third section, the Organization Bureau, to monitor the functional efficiency and excellence of the CP, of its CC, and of the entire Party-State government.