revolutionary movement, dating from the 1820’s, was in rebellion against
the despotic Czarist regime. Many of the suggested revolutionary
programs were impractical. Some demanded greater voice for the peasants
or industrial workers; some espoused violent revolution; others,
democratic reform. But on one point they all agreed: there must be a
change. The more radical groups believed in political terrorism. Their
violent escapades, however, such as assassinations, led only to greater
oppression.
Marxist writings had early found their way into Russia. The first
language into which Marx’s _Das Kapital_ (originally written in German)
had been translated was Russian. Many revolutionaries were attracted by
these new communist ideas. In 1883 a Marxist group was founded. Ten years
later, when Lenin joined an underground group in Saint Petersburg, the
movement was strong.
These early Russian Marxists, however, were deeply divided. They were
babblers of theory, not apostles of action. Lenin immediately undertook
to change the situation. But in December, 1895, he was arrested,
imprisoned, and later exiled to Siberia.
In 1900 he was released and fled from Russia, more ardent than ever for
revolution. With fiendish devotion and intensity he set about the task of
creating a revolutionary organization that could seize power in Russia.
For most of the time after 1900 Lenin and his wife, Nadezhda, lived as
exiles in Western Europe, going from city to city, often under aliases.
Nadezhda in writing about Lenin gave a vivid account of their life in
cheap boardinghouses. In Switzerland, on one occasion, they stayed in
a room where the windows could be opened only at night because of the
“intolerable stench” of a nearby sausage factory. Another time they took
their meals at a house where, in the words of Lenin’s wife, “the very
‘lower depths’ of Zurich” congregated.
Lenin was happiest when he could talk revolution. Nadezhda was
constantly on guard to protect his health. Many times Lenin, engrossed
in revolutionary activities, would work himself into a highly nervous
state. One time, Nadezhda writes, he “came home after a heated debate
... I could hardly recognize him, his face was so drawn and he could
barely speak.” She encouraged him to take a vacation. In London, Lenin
“developed a nervous illness called ‘holy fire.’” Nadezhda, after
consulting a medical student, painted him with iodine. She, however,
couldn’t prevent her husband, lost in thought while pedaling a bicycle,
from running into the back of a tram and “very nearly” knocking out an
eye.
Borrowing from the autocratic character of Marx himself, Lenin made
Marxism a highly disciplined, organized, and ruthless creed. How can
revolution be achieved? Not by democratic reforms, ballots, or good
will but by naked, bloody violence. The sword is the weapon. Everything
must be dedicated to this aim: one’s time, talents, one’s very life.
Revolutions do not just happen. They are made.
Lenin conceived of the Party as a vehicle of revolution. Marx, in
his philosophical abstractions, had never thought out the day-to-day
composition of the Party. Lenin did. The Party must be a small, tightly
controlled, deeply loyal group. Fanaticism, not members, was the key.
Members must live, eat, breathe, and dream revolution. They must lie,
cheat, and murder if the Party was to be served. Discipline must be
rigid. No deviations could be permitted. If an individual falters, he
must be ousted. Revolutions cannot be won by clean hands or in white
shirts; only by blood, sweat, and the burning torch. These ideas were all
inherent in Marxist thought, but they waited for Lenin to translate them
into organized action.
In 1903 the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (which was the Russian
Marxist Party) met in convention in Brussels. The proceedings were later
transferred to London, after Belgian authorities had warned several of
the delegates to leave the city. One session of the congress was routed
by an army of vermin.
A dispute arose. Should Party membership be restricted or open to
anybody? Lenin fought for restricted membership and won. His group was
called the Bolsheviks (the majority); the losers became the Mensheviks
(minority). The Party, Lenin said, must be composed only of trained
revolutionaries. To allow anybody, curiosity seekers, the halfhearted,
weaklings, to join would reduce the Party’s discipline, striking power,
and fanaticism. The masses couldn’t be trusted to make a revolution.
They would run at the first sound of gunfire. What were needed were men
willing to die because the Party told them to die. This principle of
Party organization remains in full effect today throughout the communist
world.
Lenin was an able propagandist and agitator. He thought chiefly in
terms of battle plans, tactics, and strategy rather than of theories
or philosophical abstractions. In 1900, from his exile in Europe, he
helped found a revolutionary paper, _Iskra_ (the _Spark_), printed
in Germany but smuggled into Russia. (A young ex-seminary student in
southern Russia, Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili, later known as
Stalin, was a reader of _Iskra_.) This paper offered directions to the
secret revolutionaries in Russia, told them the “line” to follow, urged
better Party organization. In addition, Lenin pounded out his “rules of
revolution” in articles and pamphlets that were widely circulated in the
Russian underground.
Though militant himself, Marx was never able, in his detached atmosphere,
to instill the spirit of militant action into communist policy as did
Lenin. The crafty Russian, brought up in an atmosphere of revolutionary
agitation, did not shrink from any crime. He held that there could be
no hesitation or vacillation. Use any weapon—knife, hatchet, or gun—to
achieve your aim, he urged. A man was either your friend or your foe.
Find out quickly. If a friend, clasp his hand; that is, as long as he
served a purpose. If a foe, take drastic action.
All during his lengthy exile Lenin was constantly studying, writing,
debating, and expounding revolutionary principles. Like Marx, he used the
facilities of Western democracy, such as the great library of the British
Museum, to undermine the very freedom that gave him this opportunity.
Nadezhda tells of his studies in the Geneva library:
He would again take out the books left unfinished the day
before. They would be about barricade-fighting or the technique
of offensives. He would go to his customary place at the little
table by the window, smooth down the thin hair on his bald head
with a customary gesture, and bury his nose deep in the books.
Only rarely would he get up, and then in order to take down a
dictionary from a shelf and search for the explanation of some
unfamiliar term. He would then stride up and down for a while,
resume his seat, and in a tense manner rapidly scrawl something
in minute handwriting on little squares of paper.
These studies, as later events were to prove, helped produce practical
and concrete ways of making revolutions:
[Lenin, says Nadezhda] not only read through, thoroughly
studied, and thought over everything that Marx and Engels
had written on revolution and insurrection. He also perused
numerous works on the art of warfare, considering the technique
and the organisation of the armed insurrection from all
standpoints. He was occupied with this work much more than
people realised, and his talk about “shock” groups during the
civil war and “groups of five and ten” was not the chatter of a
layman, but a well-thought-out proposition.
Lenin labored day and night for seventeen years in perfecting his plans
for the revolution. His opportunity was to come in November, 1917.
In March, 1917, revolution erupted in Russia. The German army had
defeated Russian troops. The Czar’s government was tottering, and a
liberal regime, later headed by Alexander Kerensky, assumed control.
The Czar was forced to abdicate. This was the signal for Russian
revolutionaries of all types to return to Petrograd: Lenin from
Switzerland, aided by the German High Command; Leon Trotsky, later to
become a high official in the Bolshevik regime, from New York City;
Stalin from Siberian exile.
Lenin plotted against Kerensky, eagerly awaiting the moment he could
overthrow the new government. He created dissension in the armed forces.
He refused to cooperate with the government except on his own terms. All
the time he was desperately building up and training his Bolshevik Party.
Lenin had a “sixth sense” in diagnosing revolutionary situations. He knew
when to act and when not. Like a crafty tiger, he was circling his prey.
Lenin was the true leader of the Russian revolution. Stalin, fresh from
Siberia, was relatively unknown, but he was learning the skills of deceit
and murder that were soon to catapult him to power.
In the fall of 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power in the October
Revolution. Lenin became the dictator of all Russia. Communism had made
its first breach in the wall of capitalism. (The revolution occurred
on October 25, 1917, according to the Eastern calendar then in use in
Russia. Hence, the term “October Revolution.” Under the Western calendar,
later adopted by the Soviets, the date is November 7, 1917.)
The Bolsheviks immediately instituted a terroristic “dictatorship of the
proletariat.” Marx had conceived the dictatorship of the proletariat as
a transitory period for the establishment of a communist society. Lenin,
however, dipped it in blood and gave it a prominence and ruthlessness
that shocked the entire world. The secret police, then known as the
Cheka, instituted a reign of terror; capital punishment was meted out
widely. A search for enemies rocked the country. _Pravda_, the Party
newspaper, urged drastic measures.
The Czar and members of his family were executed by the Bolsheviks and
their bodies destroyed. Here is an eyewitness account by Leonid Krassin,
a member of the early Bolshevik government, as related by his wife, Lubov
Krassin:
... we went through a period of so-called “Terror”.... About
six hundred to seven hundred persons were shot in Moscow and
Petrograd, nine-tenths of them having been arrested quite at
random or merely as suspect of belonging to the Right Wing of
the S. R.’s [Socialist Revolutionaries, a Russian revolutionary
party], or else of being counter-revolutionaries. In the
provinces this developed into a series of revolting incidents
such as arrests, executions en masse, and wholesale eviction of
bourgeois and educated people from their houses, leaving them
homeless.
The test of loyalty was often to what class the individual belonged, the
extent of his education, how he was dressed, how much food he had in his
house. If his pantry was too well stocked or his clothes too new, he
might be accused of being an exploiter and sent before an execution squad.
This was an example of the dictatorship of the proletariat in action.
This was a first step toward what Marx proclaimed as the “final” and
“perfect” state of society, which is as visionary now as it was then.
Millions of Russians found themselves gripped by a tyranny incomparably
worse than that of the Czar.
Oddly, despite the predictions of Marx, communism seized power in a
country where Marx would least have expected it. Marx had prophesied that
the revolution was destined to occur in a highly industrialized nation.
Russia was industrially backward.
During the years 1917-20 the Bolsheviks were forced to fight for
survival, first against the German army, then in a war with Poland. Also,
the White Russians, a vigorous anti-Bolshevik group, assembled powerful
military forces. A bitter White-Red civil war raged.
Lenin’s answer was a policy of “war communism.” Most industry was
nationalized. Trade and commerce were officially abolished. The
government undertook to distribute manufactured articles to the people.
In agricultural regions food supplies were openly confiscated. Poor
peasants were assembled in committees to spy on their richer neighbors
who might be hiding grain. The setting of class against class was an
established tactic of communism.
By 1921, when the last “enemies” had been driven from Russia, the
nation was a shambles. The Bolsheviks, trying to adapt Marxist theory
to a nation predominantly rural, had compounded confusion. Industrial
production was down, peasants were in open revolt. Private incentive
had been ruined. By 1922 famine raged, with tens of millions of people
starving or on a semistarvation diet. Some estimates place the loss of
life at five million. This was Russia’s introduction to communism.
Fanatical Lenin, after years of working for the revolution, would not let
it slip away from him now. He struck back furiously. Slave labor camps
were increased; dreaded secret police compelled conformity; churches were
closed. “Enemies of the people,” those who opposed the Bolsheviks, were
ruthlessly executed. Uprisings were cruelly suppressed.
However, terror was not the answer. In March, 1921, sailors of the Red
navy in Kronstadt, formerly strong Bolshevik supporters, rebelled. Lenin,
with his keen sense of timing, realized that a change had to be made.
The result was the NEP—New Economic Policy. Capitalist practices, so
denounced by the Bolsheviks, were temporarily introduced to save the
Russian government. Peasants were now allowed to keep surpluses of
grain after taxation, instead of having them confiscated. They could
even dispose of their surplus products as they chose, and private trade
was allowed to develop. In the industrial field many businesses were
returned to private owners, although the government retained control
over larger concerns.
To the surprise of Bolshevik leaders the NEP proved a relative success.
It gave them the breathing spell they so desperately needed to
consolidate their gains. Both agricultural and industrial production
jumped. Lenin never lived to see the final results of the temporary NEP,
but the revolution was no longer in immediate danger.
Lenin’s scheming mind was laying the groundwork for extending the
communist conspiracy throughout the world. In March, 1919, Lenin founded
the Third International (better known as the Communist International or
Comintern). The Third International was a keystone of Soviet policy,
whereby Moscow, through Bolshevik discipline, could guide the activities
of communists around the world, including those in the United States.
To the communists, victory in Russia was only the first step. The whole
world, they said, must go communist. “... victory is ours,” Lenin
proclaimed at the First Congress of the Comintern in 1919; “the victory
of the world Communist revolution is assured.” In early days the regime
confidently expected communist revolutions in Western Europe. A communist
regime sprang briefly into power in Hungary, another flickered in
Germany. Although no permanent communist successes were achieved outside
Russia, an effective agency of conspiracy now existed to undermine
noncommunist governments.
The skill of Lenin simply cannot be overestimated. He introduced into
human relations a new dimension of evil and depravity not surpassed
by Genghis Khan or Attila. His concept of Party supremacy, girded by
ruthless and ironclad discipline, gave communism a fanaticism and an
immorality that shocked Western civilization. Countless individuals,
some in high places, simply did not believe that men could behave as did
the Bolsheviks; that brutality, terror, and the utter meaninglessness of
human dignity could be a policy of state. But that was the contention,
and the legacy, of Lenin.
Underlying all of Lenin’s thoughts and actions was the use of naked
force to achieve Party ends. He held that there could be no permanent
coexistence between communists and noncommunists. The latter must be
liquidated, by force if necessary. “Marxists have never forgotten
that violence will be an inevitable accompaniment of the collapse of
capitalism on its full scale and of the birth of a socialist society.”
Dictatorship is power based directly upon force and
unrestricted by any laws.
* * * * *
The dictatorship of the proletariat is necessary, and victory
over the bourgeoisie is impossible without a long, stubborn and
desperate war of life and death....
* * * * *
As long as capitalism and socialism exist, we cannot live in
peace: in the end, one or the other will triumph—a funeral
dirge will be sung either over the Soviet Republic or over
world capitalism.
Lenin liked to use the word “ruthless,” which is a clue to his thinking:
There is still too little of that ruthlessness which is
indispensable for the success of socialism....
* * * * *
... capitalism cannot be defeated and eradicated without the
ruthless suppression of the resistance of the exploiters....
* * * * *
Contempt for death must spread among the masses and thus secure
victory ... the ruthless extermination of the enemy will be
their task....
This is the Lenin who has always been hailed by the Moscow ruling
hierarchy as the guiding genius of communism in Russia and in this
country. In fact, with the downgrading of Stalin, Lenin became
increasingly extolled in Russia as the “guide to communist action.”
Nikita Khrushchev, speaking before the Twentieth Congress of the Russian
Communist Party in February, 1956, stated categorically:
The central committee has always and undeviatingly been guided
by Lenin’s teachings on the party.
* * * * *
Lenin taught us that a line based on principle is the only
correct line. Never to deviate a single step in anything from
the interests of the party....
* * * * *
We must be guided by these wise injunctions of Lenin in all our
activity.
In April, 1956, a Moscow journal, _International Affairs_, also made
clear the pre-eminence of Leninism in Russia:
Using the brilliant plan left by Lenin.... All the complex
questions of home and foreign policy are decided by the Party,
basing itself on the teaching of the immortal Lenin. That is
why the Soviet people recall the words of Vladimir Mayakovsky
[Soviet poet]:
“Lenin
is now
the most live of all living,
Our weapon,
our knowledge,
our power.”
These sentiments have been echoed by communists in the United States. In
January, 1957, for example, Eugene Dennis, former General Secretary of
the Communist Party, USA, wrote, “... it is essential at all costs to
consolidate and build the CPUSA as a strong Marxist-Leninist political
party of the working class.”
Another American Party leader, Hyman Lumer, stated in February, 1957:
... he [Lenin] showed ... the need for a vanguard type of
party, armed with the Marxist theory of scientific socialism
and possessing a high degree of unity and discipline.... In its
essential features, this is no less true today than it was when
Lenin first formulated it.
Lenin could not have anticipated the lofty pedestal on which he was to
stand in Moscow a generation after his death. However, his nation and the
Party were to pass under the control of an ambitious, scowling, mustached
revolutionary from the province of Georgia in south Russia, Joseph
Stalin, who until recently was regarded as the fourth great personality
of communism.
3.
_Stalin—A Fallen Idol_
In January, 1924, after a long illness, Lenin died, leaving open a
struggle for power that was to last until the 1930’s.
The Russian dictator sensed, some time before his death, the evil
influence of the man who had squirmed his way to the position of the
Party’s General Secretary. Joseph Stalin, a cobbler’s son, had been an
old-time Bolshevik. Born in 1879, he had attended a seminary at Tiflis,
in the Caucasus, but in 1899 had been expelled. Already he was involved
in revolutionary activities. From 1902 until 1913, according to the
communists, he was arrested seven times, exiled six times, and escaped
five times from exile.
Plodding by nature, Stalin lacked the brilliance of his chief rival,
Leon Trotsky. However, his grasp of the Russian mentality was tremendous.
Years as an agitator, prison inmate, and political schemer gave him
an insight into communist intrigue that other Party leaders seemed to
lack. Working silently but meticulously, he was quick to exploit any
opportunity to increase his personal power.
Stalin liked to represent himself as the heir of Lenin, the man
predestined to carry on the Bolshevik revolution. This claim is not borne
out, however, by a “testament” prepared by Lenin shortly before his
death. “Comrade Stalin,” wrote Lenin, on Christmas Day, 1922, “having
become General Secretary, has concentrated an enormous power in his
hands; and I am not sure that he always knows how to use that power with
sufficient caution.”
Then Lenin added a postscript dated January 4, 1923, a full year before
he died:
Stalin is too rude, and this fault, entirely supportable in
relations among us Communists, becomes insupportable in the
office of General Secretary. Therefore, I propose to the
comrades to find a way to remove Stalin from that position....
However, the time for action had passed. Lenin was too sick to implement
his testament. The result: a terrific struggle between Stalin and Trotsky
for power.
Trotsky (real name Bronstein) was born in 1879 (two months earlier than
Stalin). Early a revolutionary, he spent many years as an exile from
Russia. After the Bolshevik revolution he served as Lenin’s Commissar of
Foreign Affairs and later did much to organize the Red army.
Many differences separated Stalin and Trotsky, the chief one being
Stalin’s idea that Russia should concentrate on making itself powerful
_first_, before undertaking extensive revolutionary action abroad.
Trotsky, on the other hand, believed that the Russian revolution could
survive only if communist revolutions were promoted in other countries.
Both desired world conquest. Their dispute, clouded by a personal hunger
for power, centered on how to achieve it. Stalin was the winner. Trotsky
was exiled by Stalin in 1929, eventually finding refuge in Mexico. He was
assassinated in 1940, reportedly by a secret communist agent.
Joseph Stalin was the fourth “top leader” of communism, claiming “divine”
ancestry from Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Until his death in 1953, Stalin
played a major role in the history of Russian and world communism, as
a “continuer” of the work of Lenin. It was Stalin who, through murder,
deceit, and brutality, gave communism _power_, firmly establishing
Bolshevik control in Russia and spreading communism to other countries.
However, he also was to become the first of the “Big Four” to be
denounced by the communists and to have his name blackened by successors.
In carrying on the revolution Stalin became the interpreter of
Marxism-Leninism. Under his rule the state, which Marx had visualized as
“withering away,” became even stronger, an agent of sheer oppression.
The army, navy, secret police, and all political structures of the state
grew ever more powerful and permanent. Slave labor camps multiplied.
Soviet society became ironclad, more rigid than under the most autocratic
Czar. Army officials, Party henchmen, industrial managers, all emerged
as classes, each jealous of the other. The “workingman,” whom Marx had
extolled, was now an inferior class, exploited and downtrodden.
Stalin carried to the extreme Lenin’s concepts of the Party as a
fanatical, disciplined group. To Stalin the Party was not only a tool to
seize and maintain power but also a method of liquidating all personal
opposition and a means of educating the masses in the communist way of
life.
The Party, for this reason, was kept “pure,” meaning completely loyal,
disciplined, and blindly obedient. Party schools, cadre training, and
regimented discipline were needed to saturate the members in communism.
Weaklings were purged, expelled and exiled to Siberia, or executed.
In Soviet Russia, and all her satellites, the Party was constantly
“Bolshevized”—made “more perfect in communism.”