1917

by Arthur Herman, PhD

  Russia’s major cities stood deserted. Three-quarters of the population of Petrograd and almost half that of Moscow had fled or been killed. Russia’s agriculture sector had completely collapsed. For the first time since the 1880s, famine stalked the land. During the winter of 1921–22, no fewer than three million Russians died of starvation.

  Not all these statistics can be blamed on the Great War or the Russian Civil War. The root cause was Lenin’s failed crash program of mass collectivization as part of “war communism,” which had led to chaos in the villages and on factory floors. As 1921 began, Lenin and Russia were staring catastrophe in the face. With extreme reluctance, therefore, in March 1921, Lenin was forced to backtrack on collectivization with his New Economic Policy, or NEP, which allowed a return to some private holdings and to limited market forces in order to prevent widespread famine—although repression and mass arrests of recalcitrant workers and miners continued.5

  It was still not enough. In desperation, Communist Russia turned to, of all places, the United States and the new Republican administration of Warren G. Harding. Herbert Hoover—the man who had fed Belgium’s wartime refugees, had overseen America’s food supply for Woodrow Wilson, and was now feeding postwar Germany and Europe as head of the American Relief Administration—directed millions of tons of food from U.S. farmers to Russia, and saved Lenin’s regime from collapse. The system Lenin most despised, American capitalism, had rescued the system he had created to stamp it out, Soviet communism. The irony was lost on him, and probably also on Hoover (who would be the American president in less than half a decade), but it should not be lost on anyone else.

  A desperate Lenin also turned to Germany. “Yes, learn from the Germans!” he wrote in one of his final publications, On Left Infantilism and the Petty Bourgeois Spirit.6 He had in mind “the state capitalism of the Germans,” their version of war communism that the generals had imposed in 1917. Ludendorff had saved Lenin once, by sending him to Russia to stir up revolution. Lenin hoped he could save him again by providing a model for how to organize a command economy. He even called himself and Ludendorff “two separate halves of socialism, side by side.” He began bringing German industrial experts to Russia, and at Rapallo in 1922, the pariah nations of Europe, Russia and Germany, signed a nonaggression pact. It was the start of a diplomatic path that would lead ultimately to the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact.

  The reality of communism’s failure, however, and the tactical retreat to NEP reinforced Lenin’s growing emotional outbursts at friends and colleagues alike, and fed the problems stemming from his declining health. Doctors worked around the clock to figure out why Lenin seemed more and more exhausted, and why he kept developing illnesses that took him out of action for days, even weeks at a time. Some blamed the toxic effect of Fannie Kaplan’s bullet, still imbedded in his neck, which they had considered too dangerous to remove. Others feared the possibility that he might be suffering from tertiary syphilis, although the surviving medical evidence is sketchy and incomplete, probably deliberately so. Others chalked up his health problems to a lifetime of overwork, with a poor diet and inadequate rest.

  A more plausible explanation is that Lenin suffered from the same disease as Woodrow Wilson: arterial sclerosis. Lenin’s father had died of it in 1886; other members of his family suffered from it, including his sister Anna, who would die of a stroke in 1935.7

  That spring, however, the doctors opted for the bullet theory, and on April 23, 1922, they performed an operation to remove the foreign body from his neck. They pronounced the operation a success; Lenin told them he felt no pain there for the first time in years. Then, a month later, while he was still recuperating from the operation at his retreat in Gorky, came the stroke, which not only paralyzed his right side but also made him unable to speak.

  Recovery would be slow, and in the meantime, the man who would increasingly take charge during Lenin’s convalescence would be Joseph Stalin.

  That April 4, at the Eleventh Party Congress, Lenin had ceded to his loyal Georgian lieutenant the prize position of general secretary of the Communist Party, with Vyacheslav Molotov and Nikita Khrushchev as Stalin’s deputies—the first time that unsavory pair entered into the mainstream of history. Yet the qualities Lenin had most liked in Stalin began to pall on the stricken leader. Lenin began to complain about Stalin’s steady accretion of power, which included moving his obedient cronies such as Molotov, Khrushchev, Sergey Kirov, and Lazar Kaganovich into more and more key posts in the regime. But Lenin’s own range of motion was diminishing, owing not only to his stroke but also to the fact that, in December 1922, Stalin took personal control of Lenin’s recovery, in effect turning him into a prisoner in his own home.

  Those who saw Lenin at the Fourth Congress of the Comintern on November 13 were stunned at his appearance. He was now able to walk with assistance, but after a brief speech, “he was completely wet from exhaustion, his shirt was drenched and there were beads of sweat on his forehead.”8 Even Lenin sensed that the end might be near, as Stalin’s behavior toward him and Nadya became less and less respectful—at one point, the new general secretary even threatened Lenin’s wife with a Cheka investigation for allegedly working for Lenin behind Stalin’s back. If another stroke did not bring him down, Lenin was beginning to realize, his once loyal lieutenant might.

  The day before Christmas, December 24, 1922, Lenin began dictating his last will and political testament. It is a sobering document. What comes out is not just his growing disillusionment with Stalin as a possible successor, but his dissatisfaction with everyone who would come after Stalin, and everything that he, Lenin, had left behind. He considered Trotsky “the most capable person in the present Central Committee,” but “over-preoccupied with the administrative side of things,” Lenin’s term for the ongoing repression around Russia. Stalin, he felt, had accumulated too much power, “unlimited power,” in fact, and “I am not convinced that he will always manage to use this power with sufficient care.”

  He pondered whether the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which would incorporate Communist-controlled but non-Russian soviet republics such as Georgia and Azerbaijan, was really a good idea. He expressed sorrow that his own Russian ethnic chauvinism had led him to denigrate the possibility of incorporating more non-Russians into the party and giving more freedom to their local soviets—a surprising admission from the man who had preached international revolution all his life.

  He also wrote a sentence that began, “I am, it seems, immensely guilty before the workers of Russia”—guilty not of the deaths and massacres and poverty his regime had precipitated, which he largely ignored, but of a badly conceived USSR.9 About the human costs of his great revolution, Lenin had nothing to say. If his political testament really is, as his biographer Robert Service writes, Lenin’s “baring of his soul,” it’s not hard to conclude that his soul was, to borrow a line of Emily Dickinson’s, “Zero at the Bone.”

  Yet it was Stalin who was most on Lenin’s mind. On January 4, Lenin dictated a supplementary paragraph that began, “Stalin is too crude, and this defect which is entirely acceptable in our milieu and in relationships among us as communists, becomes unacceptable in a General Secretary. I therefore propose to comrades that they should devise a means of removing him from this job.”10

  Lenin hoped to be strong enough to read his testament aloud at the Twelfth Party Congress at the end of March, but on March 10 another massive stroke intervened. This one left him almost totally paralyzed and unable to speak; it was two months before his doctors thought it safe even to move him back to Gorky. All the same, the loyal Nadya passed the document on to the party leaders, who did their best to bury it, despite her insistence that delegates to the Congress be allowed to read it.

  By then, Lenin’s wishes no longer mattered. Trotsky and Stalin were locked in a life-or-death struggle for control of the Soviet Union; neither one wanted any reference to Lenin’s political testament to leak out, and both co
uld now safely ignore the stricken architect of the Russian Revolution. Over the next ten months, Lenin was racked by more ministrokes and seizures, more than seven between November and December 1923 alone.11

  Then, on January 21, 1924, came the last one, as at 6:30 p.m. Lenin breathed his last. The funeral in Moscow was set for January 27, which turned out to be the coldest day of the year. A month later, doctors began the gruesome process of preparing the body—not for burial but for permanent embalmment. Stalin had decided that Lenin should be transformed forever into a mummy on display, a frozen monument to the revolutionary system that he had built and that Stalin, acting as his heir, would lead.

  EIGHT DAYS AFTER Lenin’s funeral, on February 4, Woodrow Wilson also died of a stroke, in his town house in Kalorama, in Washington, DC, where he had moved after leaving the White House. As with Lenin, his last years had been almost completely a time of convalescence, with only brief public appearances—his final one in 1923, on the anniversary of the armistice. He, too, had published a political last testament, “The Road Away from Revolution,” which ran in the Atlantic Monthly in August 1923. It had required months of painful effort to compose at his once reliable typewriter, which no longer seemed to respond to the command of his fingers, or in almost illegible scribbles in pencil, which the ever-faithful Edith transcribed.

  The most fascinating passage identified Lenin’s Russian Revolution as “the outstanding event of its kind in our age.”

  What gave rise to the Russian Revolution? The answer can only be that it was the product of a whole social system. It was not in fact a sudden thing. It had been gathering head for several generations. It was due to the systematic denial to the great body of Russians of the rights and privileges which all normal men desire and must have if they are to be contented and within reach of happiness. The lives of the great mass of the Russian people contained no opportunities, but were hemmed in by barriers against which they were constantly flinging their spirits, only to fall back bruised and dispirited. Only the powerful were suffered to secure their rights or even to gain access to the means of material success.

  In the end, Wilson blamed capitalism for the revolution. The inequities capitalism had unleashed in Russia had caused Russians “to see red,” as he put it—perhaps forgetting his own role in denying Russians the means to resist the Bolshevik juggernaut. Indeed, he blamed most of the ills in the modern world on what he saw as unbridled capitalism, but also ended by saying, “[O]ur civilization cannot survive materially until it be redeemed spiritually.”12

  It was a strange admission from the man who had labored so hard, as Lenin had, to change the world through politics, and whose devotion to bringing about a new global order had ended, as Lenin’s had, only in leaving behind a nation in far worse shape than it was when he took power. The day he had returned to Washington from Paris in July 1919, race riots in the nation’s capital left fifteen dead. In Chicago, similar riots left thirty-eight dead. That summer, twenty-five American cities saw the worst race violence since the Civil War.13

  At almost the same time, the country was also in the grip of the Red Scare, led by former Progressive labor lawyer and attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer and triggered by a series of terrorist bombings that were blamed on Bolshevik agitation. This led to the worst police repression the United States had seen in its history. On one day, January 2, 1920, police and federal officials rounded up three thousand foreign-born leftists in thirty-three cities. Deportations became America’s way of dealing with radical political dissent, and groups such as the IWW found themselves renewed targets of mobs and the police.

  The violence and hysteria of the Red Scare compounded an economic depression started by Wilson’s Federal Reserve, as it sharply raised interest rates at the war’s end to tamp down fears of postwar inflation. “The deflationary impact was drastic,” writes economic historian Adam Tooze. “[T]he abrupt tightening of credit tipped the American economy over the cliff.”14 By January 1921, as Warren Harding was preparing to enter the White House, industrial unemployment was estimated at 20 percent. American agriculture was hit by a crisis from which it would not recover for the rest of the century, even after the New Deal’s efforts at price supports and government-mandated cuts in farm production.15 Inflation, followed by deflation and depression, also helped to fuel the revival of extremist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan in the Deep South and the Farm Belt, and created industrial unrest elsewhere, including a strike against U.S. Steel that left twenty dead.

  In short, all that Wilson’s Progressivism had promised—racial harmony, better pay and a higher standard of living for the average worker and the little guy, a booming but more just economy carefully micromanaged by the experts at the Federal Reserve, and staying out of war—had turned out to be lies. It would take two Republican administrations, under Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, to turn America around. By the time Wilson died six months into Coolidge’s presidency, his legacy was a wreck. He was a man forsaken by his party and his country.

  As for his rival Henry Cabot Lodge, he died of a stroke nine months after Wilson’s death, on November 5, 1924. He would be remembered forever as the man who kept the United States out of the League of Nations—when in fact it was Wilson who had made America’s entry into the League impossible.

  Lenin’s rival Alexander Kerensky would live on until June 1970, in the United States. When he died in New York City, Russian Orthodox churches refused to bury him because he had allowed Bolshevism to come to power in 1917—when in fact he had been the last hope for keeping Russia on the road to democracy. Before Kerensky died, a British television interviewer asked him why he never had Lenin arrested or even killed. Kerensky could only answer quietly, “Because I never took him seriously.”16

  Leon Trotsky would be hounded into exile by his rival Stalin in 1928. He would spend the rest of his life trying to raise international awareness of the crimes Joseph Stalin was committing against the Russian people—crimes Trotsky himself would almost certainly have committed if he had won the power struggle after Lenin’s death. Twice he managed to escape assassination attempts by Stalin’s agents. Then, on August 20, 1940, an assassin found him in Mexico City and murdered him with a blow to the head with an ice pick. More than any other single person, Trotsky had brought the Bolshevik Revolution into reality—without him, Lenin would very likely have lost the Russian Civil War. Trotsky’s modest memorial in Mexico City is probably a more appropriate pilgrimage site for anyone still admiring the Bolshevik Revolution than Lenin’s grandiose tomb in Moscow’s Red Square.

  Lenin’s other savior, Erich Ludendorff, died of liver cancer on December 20, 1937. Adolf Hitler, Germany’s then-chancellor, who had been Ludendorff’s protégé in the 1920s, gave him an elaborate state funeral, something Ludendorff had specifically requested not happen. By 1933, Ludendorff had turned against Hitler. On the day Hitler took office as chancellor, Ludendorff sent a telegram to his old commander in chief, field marshal, and now president Hindenburg, warning him, “I solemnly prophesy that this accursed man will cast our Reich into the abyss and bring our nation to inconceivable misery.”17 Thus, the man who had made so many wrong judgments regarding his country—resuming unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917, launching the final disastrous offensive in March 1918, not to mention letting Lenin and his Bolsheviks return to Russia—finally got one right, but too late to prevent his prediction from coming true.

  Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg died in Switzerland on New Year’s Day 1921, a broken man whose only son had been killed in the war that he, more than any other single person, had allowed to happen. Arthur Zimmermann, author of the infamous telegram that finally pushed America into the war, and who authorized Lenin’s journey across German territory to the Finland Station, died on June 6, 1940, just as Germany was poised to win the war against France that it had failed to win in 1914.

  That war of 1940 would be the undoing of the man who emerged as a national hero of the first one, Marshal Phil
ippe Pétain. Having served as president of the puppet Vichy government following France’s catastrophic defeat, he would be sentenced to death after France’s liberation in 1945. President Charles de Gaulle commuted the death sentence and allowed Pétain to sit out the rest of his sentence in a prison on the Île d’Yeu, in the Mediterranean, where the man who had saved the French army from collapse in 1917 finally died in July 1951, at age ninety-five.

  David Lloyd George lived on to serve his country in the Second World War, before his death on March 26, 1945, on the eve of final victory. As the senior statesman of his Liberal Party in the House of Commons, he gave a pivotal speech that doomed Neville Chamberlain’s government in the aftermath of the Norwegian campaign and enabled his lifelong friend Winston Churchill to become prime minister in May 1940.*

  By the time Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin, men who all got their start on the world stage in 1917, assumed their roles as supreme leaders in the next world war, Woodrow Wilson and Lenin had passed into historical memory, if anyone thought of them at all. But the Big Three were actually only dealing with the legacy Wilson and Lenin had left them starting that fateful year—and the new world disorder they had set in motion.

  SO, WHO WERE these two extraordinary men, Lenin and Wilson? And what was their legacy?

  Both men were visionaries, certainly; utopians, clearly. Both foresaw the need to change the world for the better, by sweeping away everything that seemed to root the present in a corrupt and irredeemable past. Each set his eyes on a bright new future of mankind—two very different futures in many ways, but futures that shared many characteristics.