A history of Russia

by Riazanovsky

  Yet, although this line of reasoning has some validity and helps to situate the great Bolshevik leader in the history of Russian radicalism - where he certainly belongs as much as in the history of world Marxism - it should not be pursued too far. After all, Lenin dedicated his entire mature life to the theory and practice of Marxism, which he considered to be infallibly true. Besides, while one does not have to subscribe to the official Soviet view that Lenin is the perfect creative Marxist, neither does one have to endorse the view, common among Western Social Democrats, that Lenin and communism betrayed Marxism. In fact, both Lenin's "hard" line, emphasizing the role of the party, revolution, and ruthlessness, and the "soft" approach of Western revisionists can be legitimately deduced from the vast and sometimes inconsistent writings of Marx and Engels.

  The Intolerance

  Comprehensiveness and ruthless intolerance have been among the most important salient features of Marxism-Leninism. While provoked to an

  extent by such practical circumstances as the requirements of ruling a state - states, eventually - and the strong and manifold opposition that had to be overcome, these traits nevertheless reside at the heart of the ideology itself. As already explained, Marxism constitutes an all-inclusive view of the world, metaphysical rather than empirical, which omits nothing of importance and possibly - at least so it can be argued in theory - nothing at all. Moreover, its teachings are believed to have the conclusiveness of scientific laws. In other words, to its adherents Marxism-Leninism represents a science, and those who oppose it are regarded by them as absolutely and demonstrably wrong. No matter how sophisticated, these critics ultimately deserve no more consideration than misguided, superstitious peasants who object to inoculation against cholera. More precisely, they are either misguided or class enemies; in the latter case they obviously deserve no favorable consideration at all.

  Ruthlessness has also been promoted by the peculiar Marxist ethics, or rather absence of ethics. Ethics, which belongs to the "superstructure" of society, has no independent existence in Marxism. According to that teaching, men behave as they do because of their class nature, because of the fundamental economic and social realities of their lives. Only a change in these realities can and will alter human conduct. Therefore, there will be no moral turpitude and no crime in the ideal society of the future. In the meantime, one is invited to hate the unregenerate world and all its standards and to struggle, with few inhibitions, if any, for the victory of communism.

  A pseudo-science, Marxism-Leninism also possesses numerous earmarks of a pseudo-religion. Berdiaev and other commentators have emphasized the extent to which it proclaims itself to be the truth, the ultimate and entirely comprehensive total, the first and the last, alpha and omega. It determines in effect the right and the wrong and divides the world into white and black. More specifically, it has been suggested that communism has its doctrine of salvation: its Messiah is the proletariat; its paradise is classless society; its church is the party; and its Scriptures are the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and, until recently, Stalin. The dialectic of class struggle will suddenly cease when man attains the just society - when man leaps from the kingdom of necessity into the kingdom of freedom. It is probably this pseudo-religious aspect of Marxism-Leninism, even more than its explicit materialism, that makes its frequently fanatical disciples determined enemies of Christianity and of every other religion - for no human being can serve two gods.

  Needless to say, Marxism-Leninism is not a democratic teaching. While its followers remain convinced that it represents the interests of the masses, the correctness of the ideology and the need to carry it out in practice do

  not depend in the least on popular approval or disapproval. More than that, Marxism-Lenism has been remarkably exclusive. Where most other major beliefs appeal to all human beings, Marx began with the assumption that the exploiting classes can never have a change of heart, but must be overthrown. Struggle and violence - ruthlessness once more - form the very fabric of the Marxist doctrine. Even among the exploited, Lenin insisted, few could fully comprehend their own situation and the course of history. Left to themselves, workers develop nothing more promising than a trade union mentality. Only the Party, only an elite, can really see the light. And communist parties have invariably continued to be exclusive.

  The Appeal

  What makes a communist? The ideology itself has no doubt offered numerous attractions to the intellect and helped many people to understand the world. It does represent one of the most impressive systems in the history of Western thought, and it is related to a number of main intellectual currents of the Western tradition. Its greatest strength lies perhaps in its explanation of human exploitation and misery and in its reasoned promise to end both. Those who fail to see the intellectual attractions of communism on either side of the "iron curtain" should consider carefully the testimony of such writers as Milosz who left the Polish "people's democracy," or of the several brilliant ex-Communists who contributed to the book The God That Failed. Yet rational persuasiveness stops far short of accounting entirely for the appeal of communism. Of course, both materialism and the dialectic, which are enormously important assumptions, remain unproved. More specific Marxist doctrines, for instance, the crucial labor theory of value, have been very effectively criticized. In addition, Marxist predictions have often been disproved by time. To cite only two of the more important examples, with the middle class growing rather than declining, a polarization into capitalists and workers has failed to take place in capitalist societies; also, in these societies the standard of living of the workers has been improving rather than deteriorating. Marxism possesses no invincible logic, and no scientific certainty; it does provide an elaborate intellectual rationalization and a splendid intellectual facade for those who subscribe to the teaching for nonintellectual reasons.

  Especially significant, therefore, might be the link between Marxism-Leninism on the one hand and alienation and protest on the other. Communism has become the vehicle for almost every kind of criticism of the established order, and it has profited from a wide variety of weaknesses

  and mistakes of noncommunist societies. Indeed, communists seized power not, as predicted, in the advanced industrial countries of the West, but in Russia and in China where relatively backward economic conditions - very different in degree in the two instances - were combined with misery and great tensions and crises. And in both countries the rising class of intellectuals refused to identify itself with the existing system and led the struggle against it. However, even if we allow much for alienation and protest as factors in the rise of communism, we are faced with the question as to why it is communism, rather than some other teaching, that has attracted so many sensitive or dissatisfied people.

  To suggest one answer among many, one might mention the four reasons for the appeal of Marxism emphasized by Isaiah Berlin. These include, to begin with, its comprehensiveness and its claim to be the key to knowing everything in the present, the past, and the future. Moreover, the doctrine itself and the knowledge that it gives are allegedly scientific: many social teachings in the nineteenth century, such as Fourier's peculiar Utopian socialism or Comte's positivism, claimed scientific validity, but Marxism managed to identify itself more successfully with science than any other. Comprehensiveness and scientific authority become especially attractive with the abandonment of religion and other secure moorings. In the third place, Marxism, in spite of its deterministic aspect, is an activist and optimistic teaching: history is moving in the right direction, and every true believer can have a useful role in furthering its progress. Finally, Marxism possessed from the start a ready-made audience so to speak, the working class, which was invited to take over the world. Later Lenin tried his best to extend the audience to the poor peasants and to colonial peoples.

  To move from Berlin's "semirational" reasons for the appeal of Marxism, Lasswell might serve as a representative guide to the slippery area of the irrational appeal. In the lan
guage of social psychology and psychoanalysis, he selected such qualities of Marxism-Leninism as its stress on the transitory nature of the present social order, which leads to a redefinition of expectancies about the future and encourages projection. Marxism condemns the capitalist system in clearly moral terms, accusing it in particular of denying affectionate care and attention to the individual and of giving unfair advantage to some over others. The doctrine gains from its prestigious "scientific" form and from its alleged objective quality as well as from specificity, i.e., in analyzing the unjust capitalist society, Marxists point to "surplus value" and "profits" rather than merely to such general factors as human greed or corruption. The extremely vague Marxist Utopia, too, serves valuable purposes: it gives free rein to every individual's choice and his craving for omnipotence, and it protects the Marxist ideal from being tied to unpopular or transitory social phenomena.

  Doctrines, it should be added, are held no less firmly when they are held irrationally; in fact, it can be argued that they are held more firmly if irrationally.

  Concluding Remarks

  When Communists seized power in Russia in 1917 they had to face an unforeseen situation: revolution erupted in Russia rather than in the industrial West, and it came to one country only rather than to the entire capitalist world. While Lenin and his associates tried to adjust to these facts, they had also to deal with countless other problems, some of them of utmost urgency. After the first hectic months, and years too, Soviet history has continued to be a story of great pressures, crises, and conflicts. Under these difficult, and at times desperate, circumstances it is remarkable not how little but how much Russian Communist leaders adhered to the pursuit of their ideological goals - from Lenin's determination to build socialism on the morrow of the Revolution, to Stalin's fantastic five-year plans, and to Khrushchev's efforts to speed the establishment of a truly communist society. An account of this pursuit belongs to the following chapters.

  XXXVI

  WAR COMMUNISM, 1917-21, AND THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY, 1921-28

  You will never be alive again,

  Never rise from the snow:

  Twenty-eight bayonet,

  Five fire wounds.

  A bitter new garment

  I sewed for my friend.

  It does love, does love blood-

  The Russian earth.

  AKHMATOVA

  Where are the swans? And the swans have left. And the ravens? And the ravens have remained.

  TSVETAEVA

  Of all the Governments which were set up in Russia to combat revolutionary rule, only one, that of the Social Revolutionaries at Samara, had the wisdom to assure the peasants that the counterrevolution did not mean the restoration of the land to the landlords. All the rest, in greater or less degree, made plain their policy of reestablishing or compensating them. It was this, and no transcendent virtue in the Bolsheviks, which decided the issue of the three years' struggle, in despite of British tanks and French munitions and Japanese rifles and bayonets.

  MAYNARD

  Although the Bolsheviks seized power easily in Russia in November 1917, they managed to consolidate their new position only after several years of bitter struggle. In addition to waging a major and many-faceted civil war, the Soviet government had to fight Poland and deal with the Allied intervention. The Bolsheviks, in a desperate effort to survive, mobilized the population and resources in the area that they controlled and instituted a drastic regime which came to be known as "War Communism." Communist rule did survive, although at a tremendous price. To revive an utterly exhausted, devastated, and starving country, the so-called "New Economic Policy" replaced War Communism and lasted from 1921 to 1928, until the beginning of Stalin's First Five-Year Plan. The period of the New Economic Policy has been rightly contrasted with that of War Communism as a time of relaxation and compromise. Yet, on

  the whole the Soviet government showed more continuity than change in its policies and pursued its set goals with intelligence and determination - as a brief treatment of the first decade of Communist rule should indicate.

  The New Government. Lenin

  The Soviet government was organized two days after the October Revolution, on November 9, 1917, under the name of the Council of People's Commissars. Headed by Lenin as chairman, the Council contained such prominent members of the Bolshevik party as Trotsky, who became commissar for foreign affairs, Alexis Rykov, who became commissar of the interior, and Joseph Dzhugashvili, better known as Stalin, who assumed charge of national minorities. Lenin thus led the government as well as the party and was recognized as by far the most important figure of the new regime in Russia.

  Lenin was born in an intellectual family - his father was a school inspector - in 1870 in a town on the Volga named Simbirsk, later Ulianovsk. Vladimir Ulianov proved to be a brilliant student both in secondary school and at the University of Kazan, where he studied law. He early became a radical - the execution of his eldest brother in 1887 for participating in a plot to assassinate Alexander III has sometimes been considered a turning point for him - and then became a Marxist, suffering imprisonment in 1896 and Siberian exile for the three years following. He participated in the publication of a Social Democratic newspaper, The Spark, which was printed abroad beginning in 1900, and in other revolutionary activities, often under the pseudonym of N. Lenin. At first awed by the "father of Russian Marxism," Plekhanov, Lenin before long struck out on his own, leading the Bolshevik group in the Social Democratic party split in 1903. We have already met Lenin as an important Marxist theoretician. But practice meant more than theory for the Bolshevik leader. Most of his writings in fact were polemical, brief, and to the point: they denounced opponents or deviationists in ideology and charted the right way for the faithful. As Lenin remarked when events in 1917 interrupted his work on a treatise, The State and Revolution: "It is more pleasant and more useful to live through the experience of a revolution than to write about it."

  The Great October Revolution, masterminded by Lenin, gave him power that he continued to exercise in full until largely incapacitated by a stroke in May 1922. After that he still kept some control until his death on January 21, 1924. Moreover, in contrast to Stalin's later terrorism, Lenin's leadership of the party did not depend at all on the secret police, but rather on his own personality, ability, and achievement. Perhaps ap-

  propriately, whereas Stalin's cult experienced some remarkable reversals of fortune shortly after his demise, that of Lenin kept, if anything, gaining in popularity throughout the communist world until its collapse in the late 1980's.

  The communist myth of Lenin does not stand far from reality in many respects. For Lenin was a dedicated Bolshevik, who lived and breathed revolution and communism. Moreover, he did so naturally, compulsively to be more exact, rather than as an imposition or a burden. Although not superhumanly clever and virtually infallible, as Soviet propaganda would have it, he did combine high intelligence, an ability for acute theoretical thinking, and practical sense to become a great Marxist "realist." The amalgam proved ideal for communist purposes: Lenin never wavered in his Marxist faith; yet he knew how to adapt it, drastically if need be, to circumstances. Other outstanding qualities of the Bolshevik leader included exceptional will power, persistence, courage, and the ability to work extremely hard. Even Lenin's simple tastes and modest, almost ascetic, way of life were transposed easily and appropriately from the actual man to his mythical image.

  To be sure, there is another way to look at this paragon of Communist virtues. Devotion to an exclusive doctrine led to narrow vision. In the opinion of some specialists, the break between Plekhanov and Lenin, between the older Marxist who never lost humanistic standards and culture and the young fanatic confident that the end justified the means, represented a fundamental division in modern Russian history. Ruthlessness followed from fanaticism as well as from Lenin's conviction that he, and sometimes only he, knew the right answer. In the name of a future Utopia, horrible things could be sanct
ioned in the present. Churchill once commented on Lenin: "His aim to save the world. His method to blow it up." The two objectives go ill together.

  The First Months

  The Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which met in Petrograd on the seventh of November, approved the Bolshevik revolution, although moderate socialists walked out of the gathering. In Moscow Soviet authority was established only after a week of fighting, because some military units remained loyal to the Provisional Government. Relying on local Soviets, the Bolsheviks spread their rule to numerous other towns and areas. The first serious challenge to the Bolshevik government occurred in January 1918, when the Constituent Assembly, for which elections had been held in late autumn, finally met. The 707 members who assembled in the capital on January 18 included 370 Socialist Revolutionaries, 40 Left Socialist Revolutionaries who had split from the