Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (17 page)

What Lenin liked in Stalin was undoubtedly his enormous capacity for endless drudgery behind a desk. A man like Trotsky was happy enough in violent action, or in violent polemics in speech and print. What he lacked was the willingness to engage, day after day and month after month, in the hard slog of running the party or state machinery. For this Stalin had an insatiable appetite, and since he appeared to possess no ideas of his own, or rather adopted Lenin’s the moment they were explained to him, Lenin piled more and more offices and detailed bureaucratic work upon this patient and eager beast of burden. At the eighth Party Congress in the spring of 1919, three new bodies of great importance emerged. These were a six-member Secretariat of the Central Committee, an Organization Bureau (Orgburo) to run the party on a day-to-day basis, and a Political Bureau or Politburo of five, to ‘take decisions on questions not permitting of delay’. To avoid the dangers of a clash between these three bodies, an interlocking membership was arranged. Stalin’s name appeared on both the Politburo and the Orgburo lists.

Holding this multiplicity of posts (which included membership of several other important committees), and exercising to the full his capacity for work, Stalin in the years 1919–21, and clearly on Lenin’s instructions and with his full support, began to move men around within the labyrinthine hierarchies of party and government and Soviet organs, with a view to securing a more homogeneous, disciplined and docile machine, totally responsive to Lenin’s will. He thus acquired an immensely detailed knowledge of personalities, throughout Russia as well as at the centre, and gradually also gained his own following since he became known as the most consistent
job-provider. All this time he was Lenin’s instrument. He was the perfect bureaucrat; and he had found the perfect master, with a huge will and an absolutely clear sense of direction.

It is significant that Stalin’s handiwork in the recesses of the party first began to be visible at the tenth Party Congress in 1921, when Lenin got the party to abdicate power over itself. This procedure, which in effect gave the Central Committee the right to pass death sentences on any members (including its own), meant that Lenin had to possess an absolutely dependable two-thirds majority on the cc. Stalin supplied it. The newly elected Central Committee included many already closely linked to him: Komarov, Mikhailov, Yaroslavsky, Ordzhonikidze, Voroshilov, Frunze, Molotov, Petrovsky, Tuntal, and candidate-members like Kirov, Kuibyshev, Chubar and Gusev. These were the pliable legion Stalin had recruited on Lenin’s behalf. He was also extremely active in the new ‘Personal Chancery’ or Party Secretariat, which began to grow almost as fast as the Cheka, and for similar reasons. In May 1919 it had a staff of thirty; this had risen to 150 by the ninth Party Congress of March 1920; and the next year, when Lenin killed democracy in the party, it was swollen to 602, plus its own 140-strong staff of guards and messengers.
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Finally, at the eleventh Party Congress, Lenin gave Stalin formal possession of this little private empire he had so lovingly assembled when he made him General-Secretary of the party, with his henchmen Molotov and Kuibyshev as assistants. This was decided secretly and announced in a little tucked-away story in
Pravda
on 4 April 1922. One of the Bolsheviks, Preobrazhensky, protested against such concentration of power in Stalin’s personal grip. Was it ‘thinkable’, he asked, ‘that one man should be able to answer for the work of two commissariats as well as the work of the Politburo, the Orgburo and a dozen party committees?’
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The protest seems to have been ignored.

Two months later Lenin had his first stroke. But his work was already complete. He had systematically constructed, in all its essentials, the most carefully engineered apparatus of state tyranny the world had yet seen. In the old world, personal autocracies, except perhaps for brief periods, had been limited, or at least qualified, by other forces in society: a church, an aristocracy, an urban bourgeoisie, ancient charters and courts and assemblies. And there was, too, the notion of an external, restraining force, in the idea of a Deity, or Natural Law, or some absolute system of morality. Lenin’s new despotic utopia had no such counterweights or inhibitions. Church, aristocracy, bourgeoisie had all been swept away. Everything that was left was owned or controlled by the state. All rights whatsoever were vested in the state. And, within that state, enormous and
ever-growing as it was, every single filament of power could be traced back to the hands of a minute group of men – ultimately to one man. There was, indeed, an elaborate and pretentious structure of representation. By 1922 it meant nothing whatever. You could search its echoing corridors in vain to find a spark of democratic life. How could it be otherwise? Lenin hated the essence of democracy; and he regarded its forms merely as a means to legitimize violence and oppression. In 1917, the year he took power, he defined a democratic state as ‘an organization for the systematic use of violence by one class against the other, by one part of the population against another’.
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Who—whom?
was his paramount criterion. Who was doing what to whom? Who was oppressing whom; exploiting or shooting whom? To a man who thought in such terms, who seems to have been incapable of thinking in any other terms, how could it have been possible to envisage a set of political arrangements except as a despotism, conducted by an autocrat and ruling by violence?

At Lenin’s last Party Congress, his imagery, more than ever, was militaristic: rifles, machine-guns, firing-squads, it is indispensable’, he said, ‘to punish strictly, severely, unsparingly the slightest breach of discipline.’ Or again, ‘Our revolutionary courts must shoot.’
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Not ‘desirable’ but
indispensable.
Not ‘may’ but
must.
It was he himself, at this time, who drafted the paragraph which remains to this day the basis, in Soviet criminal law, of the despotism:

Propaganda or agitation or participation in an organization or co-operation with organizations having the effect … of helping in the slightest way that part of the international bourgeoisie which does not recognize the equal rights of the Communist system coming to take the place of capitalism, and which is endeavouring to overthrow it by force, whether by intervention or blockade or by espionage or by financing of the press or by any other means – is punishable by death or imprisonment.
¹²⁴

What else was this paragraph, as all-inclusive as words could make it, but an unrestricted licence for terror? That indeed was its purpose, as he explained in a letter to the Commissar of Justice, Kursky, written 17 May 1922, on the eve of his stroke: ‘The paragraph on terror must be formulated as widely as possible, since only revolutionary consciousness of justice and revolutionary conscience can determine the conditions of its application in practice.’
¹²⁵
Here, Lenin was encapsulating his lifelong contempt for any system of moral law. Just as, a few years later, Adolf Hitler was to justify his actions in accordance with what he termed ‘the higher law of the party’, so Lenin laid down the ‘revolutionary
conscience’ as the only moral guide to the use of the vast machine for slaughter and cruelty he had brought into existence.

It may be that Lenin believed there was such a thing as a ‘revolutionary conscience’. No doubt he thought he possessed one. Up to the end of 1918 he occasionally intervened in the terror to save the life of someone he knew personally. But everything else he said and did, in speech and writing, in public pronouncements and private letters, was to goad on his subordinates to further savagery, particularly towards the end. There is no doubt whatever that Lenin was corrupted by the absolute power he forged for himself. So were his colleagues. The very process of violent revolution, and violent self-preservation thereafter, inevitably destroyed conscience and all other elements of idealism. The point had been well made a decade before, by the wise and sad old Pole Joseph Conrad, in his novel about revolution,
Under Western Eyes
(1911):

In a real revolution, the best characters do not come to the front. A violent revolution falls into the hands of narrow-minded fanatics and of tyrannical hypocrites at first. Afterwards come the turn of all the pretentious intellectual failures of the time. Such are the chiefs and the leaders. You will notice that I have left out the mere rogues. The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane and devoted natures, the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement, but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims: the victims of disgust, disenchantment – often of remorse. Hopes grotesquely betrayed, ideals caricatured – that is the definition of revolutionary success.

Only Lenin’s curious myopia about people, springing from his fundamental lack of interest in them as individuals, prevented him from recognizing that the civil war destroyed the last vestiges of what ‘revolutionary conscience’ might once have existed. By that time, of course, he himself had been consumed by the organic cancer of power. The process had been described in a novel he must surely, once, have read, Dostoevsky’s
House of the Dead:

Whoever has experienced the power, the unrestrained ability to humiliate another human being … automatically loses power over his own sensations. Tyranny is a habit, it has its own organic life, it develops finally into a disease. The habit can kill and coarsen the very best man to the level of a beast. Blood and power intoxicate …. The man and the citizen die with the tyrant forever; the return to human dignity, to repentance, to regeneration, becomes almost impossible.

Certainly, Lenin never showed the slightest regrets about his lifework, though in the last two-and-a-half years of his existence he was a sick, angry, frustrated and ultimately impotent creature. It is
argued that, towards the end, he recognized Stalin as the emergent monster he undoubtedly was, and sought desperately to build up Trotsky’s influence as a countervailing force. One would like to think that Lenin became a victim of his own despotism. But the facts are by no means clear. There is however one suggestive and sinister element. As part of his dehumanizing process, Lenin had insisted from the beginning of his rule that the party organs take an interest in the health of senior party men, and issue them (on medical advice) with orders about leave, hospitalization and rest. In mid-1921 Lenin began to experience severe headaches. On 4 June the Orgburo ordered him to take leave; he disobeyed it. He took a month’s leave in July, and began to work less thereafter; there were further orders, from the Politburo, in August. He resumed normal work on 13 September for nearly three months, but in early December his health got worse and he spent more time at his country house at Gorky outside Moscow. In the early weeks of 1922 there were more orders to do little or no work, and he was supposed to visit Moscow only with the permission of the Party Secretariat. His impress was on the tenth Party Congress throughout but ostensibly he only chaired a few committees. He had just left Moscow for a further rest when he had his first stroke on 25 May 1922. He was then completely out of action for months, and when he returned to work on 2 October, the Secretariat, in the name of the Central Committee, enforced a strict regime and prevented him from getting access to papers. There is no doubt at all that Stalin was the most active agent of this medical restriction, and on 18 December he had himself formally appointed supervisor of Lenin’s health.
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This led directly to the Lenin—Stalin breach. Stalin discovered that Lenin had been secretly working, contrary to party orders, and, in particular, had been dictating letters to his wife. He abused Krupskaya on the phone and threatened to have her investigated by the Central Control Commission.
¹²⁷
On 24 December Lenin dictated his so-called ‘testament’. This discussed six Soviet leaders by name. Stalin was said to have too much power, which he might wield with too little caution. Trotsky was described as ‘over-preoccupied with the purely administrative side of things’ (’administrative’ was Lenin’s euphemism for force and terror). On the night of 30 December Lenin dictated a further note, showing increased hostility to Stalin, and his last two articles were attacks on Stalin’s Control Commission. On 4 January 1923 Lenin dictated a postscript to his ‘testament’: ‘Stalin is too rude … intolerable in a Secretary-General. I therefore propose to our comrades to consider a means of removing Stalin from this post.’
¹²⁸
On the night of 5 March Lenin wrote to Stalin, rebuking him for abusing his wife on the phone and telling
him to apologize or face ‘the rupture of relations between us’. Four days later came the second, debilitating stroke which robbed Lenin of speech, movement and mind. A final stroke killed him in January 1924 but by then he had long since ceased to count.

Lenin thus bequeathed to his successor all the elements of a personal despotism in furious working order. What, in the meantime, had happened to the Utopia? In 1919 the American journalist Lincoln Steffens accompanied an official US mission sent by Wilson to Russia to find out what was going on there. On his return, Bernard Baruch asked him what Lenin’s Russia was like, and Steffens replied, ‘I have been over into the future – and it works!’
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This was one of the earliest comments by a western liberal on the new kind of totalitarianism, and it set the pattern for much that was to come. What on earth can Steffens have seen? The whole object of Lenin’s ‘vanguard élite’ revolution was to speed up the industrialization of the country and thus the victory of the proletariat. Yet once Lenin took over the reverse happened. Before the war, Russian industrial production was increasing very fast: 62 per cent between 1900 and 1913.
¹³⁰
Until the end of 1916 at any rate it continued to expand in some directions. But once the peasants refused to hand over their 1917 harvest (to Lenin’s delight and profit) and food ceased to flow into the towns, the industrial workers, many of them born peasants, began to drift back to their native villages. Lenin’s revolution turned the drift into a stampede. Beginning in the winter of 1917–18, the population of Petrograd fell from 2.4 to 1.5 million; by 1920 it was a ghost town, having lost 71.5 per cent of its population; Moscow lost 44.5 per cent. The year Steffens ‘went over into the future’, the Russian industrial labour force had fallen to 76 per cent of its 1917 total, and the wastage was greatest among skilled workers. Production of iron ore and cast iron fell to only 1.6 and 2.4 per cent of their 1913 totals, and total output of manufactured goods, by 1920, was a mere 12.9 per cent of pre-war.
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By 1922, the year Lenin had his first stroke, the more independent-minded members of the regime were talking of the de-industrialization of Russia. Maxim Gorky told a French visitor: