Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler

by Robert Gellately

  Lenin’s role was crucial in the creation of the regime, but he did not act alone. The disciples in his entourage grew in number and, whatever their earlier beliefs, came round to his view that the revolution justified the use of violence. They saw no contradiction in the fact that utopian Communism could be kept in power only by using untrammeled terror.

  By the end of the civil war Lenin had become in practice a dictator. His colleagues usually rushed to agree with him and competed in their radicalism and advocacy of violence. It was a fleeting moment when they dared suggest that the terror might be getting out of hand. If they hinted at some disagreement, he wanted them purged or worse.

  “SEEING LIKE A GENERAL”

  The inescapable economic problems could not be overcome by applying terror. Holding on to radical Communism was making the situation worse, and the only realistic alternative was to backpedal somewhat, to get the economy going again before trying to steam full speed toward Communism. Lenin decided, in the face of much opposition in the Party, to introduce the New Economic Policy (NEP). As he put it in several speeches at the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921, they had made mistakes. On the second to last day of the meetings he admitted that as “long as there is no revolution in other countries, the only thing that can save the Socialist revolution in Russia is agreement with the peasantry.” Given the vast country, some freedom of exchange at the local level was inevitable, and in trying to stamp that out, they went too far. “We must recognize the fact,” he continued, “that the masses are utterly worn out and exhausted. What can you expect after seven years of war in this country, if the more advanced countries still feel the effects of four years of war? In this backward country, the workers, who have made unprecedented sacrifices, and the mass of the peasants are in a state of utter exhaustion. What is needed now is an economic breathing space.”2

  This was bitter medicine, and Lenin had to face down the militants who did not want a whisper about appearing to return to the past. He was a more flexible tactician than the doctrinaire Communists. The revolution had started in a country that was backward and disadvantaged. That was why, as he told his comrades frankly at the Ninth All-Russian Congress of Soviets in December 1921, “we have to retreat to state capitalism, retreat to concessions, retreat to trade. Without this, it will not be possible to have good relations with the peasants in the terrible conditions in which we now find ourselves. Without this, the revolution’s vanguard might quickly move so far ahead that it would lose touch with the peasants. There would be no contact between the vanguard and the peasants, and that would mean the collapse of the revolution.”3

  Nevertheless, he remained committed to the principle of one-party rule. He introduced the NEP as a necessary evil. He made his undiminished militancy clear at the meeting of the Communist International in early July 1922: “Dictatorship is a state of intense war. That happens to be the state we are in. There is no military invasion at present; but we are still isolated…. Until the struggle is decided, this awful state of war will continue…. And we say: we do not promise any freedom, or any democracy. We say to the peasants quite openly that they must choose between the rule of the bourgeoisie and the rule of the Bolsheviks.”4

  Vyacheslav M. Molotov, one of the most influential of the Soviet Communist leaders, recalled Lenin’s seeing like a general: “Now we are retreating to retrench, but then we will launch an even greater offensive!”5 Many of the committed, believing the answer was more Communism, not less, were disgusted and turned in their membership cards.

  Lenin wanted to relax the terror as well, if only temporarily, and suggested at the Ninth All-Russian Congress of Soviets that the Cheka had done good work but that it had to be reformed:

  The task now facing us is the development of trade, which is required by the New Economic Policy, and this demands greater revolutionary legality. Of course, had we made this the priority when we were attacked and Soviet power was seriously threatened, we would have been pedants, playing at revolution, but not making the revolution. The closer we come to conditions of unshakable and lasting power and the more trade develops, the more important it is to promote greater revolutionary legality, and the less need there is to have the state match the plotters blow for blow.6

  On January 23, 1922, the Politburo renamed the secret police the State Political Administration—Gosudarstvennoe Politicheskoe Upravlenie, or GPU. The strength of the secret police was reduced from 143,000 in December 1921 to 105,000 in May 1922. But the police had a network of agents and contacts, and perhaps as many as one in four city dwellers was some kind of secret informant.7

  Lenin still favored isolating or eliminating “class enemies” but wanted to give terror better cover and in that sense advocated a slight retreat. Nonetheless, only a fortnight after dissolving the Cheka and replacing it with the GPU, he wrote to Commissar of Justice Kursky on February 20 that he wanted the courts to fill the vacuum.

  He expected Kursky to stage show trials or what he called “a series of model trials (exemplifying swift and forceful repression, and serving to educate the masses through the courts and the press) in Moscow, Petrograd, Kharkov, and several other major centers; see to it, through the Party, that the people’s judges and members of the revolutionary tribunals take steps to improve the courts’ performance and intensify the repression.” Lenin told Kursky to ensure that the new criminal code (then being drawn up) contain a paragraph on terror, with the concept “formulated as widely as possible.”8

  The strain of economic and political problems may have contributed to Lenin’s deteriorating health, the deeper causes of which baffled his doctors. Some thought he suffered from syphilis. In any event, the effects of the illness led to sudden collapses that left him partially paralyzed, and by early June 1921 members of the Politburo, the half dozen men at the top of the political pyramid, were quite concerned and insisted he take time to rest.9

  FROM LENIN TO STALIN

  Though Lenin was infirm by the time of the Eleventh Party Congress in March 1922, he attended and certainly influenced the outcome. Leon Trotsky and some of his allies had reservations about the NEP and wanted it offset by creating a state plan (in the State Planning Commission, or Gosplan) for the economy as a whole. In response, Lenin admitted that any retreat for revolutionaries was a difficult matter. However, he tried to put the best face on it by once again using the telling analogy of an army at war:

  During a victorious advance, even if discipline is not so strict, everybody moves forward on his own accord. During a retreat, however, discipline must be more deliberate and is a hundred times more necessary, because, when the entire army is in retreat, it does not know or see where it should stop. It sees only retreat; under such circumstances a few panic-stricken voices are sometimes enough to cause a stampede. The danger here is huge. When a real army is in retreat, machine guns are ready, and if an orderly retreat degenerates into a disorderly one, a command to fire is given, and quite rightly, too.10

  Lenin saw the Party as the “General Staff,” run by an elite of not more than a “dozen tried and talented leaders.” Stalin built on this point in his famous exposition of Lenin’s teachings in 1924, when he compared the political struggle to an army fighting a war:

  Who can clearly see in these conditions, who can give guidance to the proletarian millions? No army at war can do without an experienced General Staff if it is not to be doomed to defeat. Is it not true that the proletariat is all the more in need of such a General Staff if it is not to be devoured by its mortal enemies? But where is this General Staff? Only the revolutionary party of the proletariat can act as this General Staff. The working class without a revolutionary party is an army without a General Staff. The Party is the General Staff of the proletariat.11

  Lenin used Stalin and his allies to undermine Trotsky’s opposition to the NEP and forced the policy through. Trotsky made a fatal mistake by opposing Lenin at what would be his last Party congress. The NEP became the new official line. In thanks, L
enin spoke out for Stalin and saw to his reelection to the two top committees of the Party—the Politburo and the Orgburo (Organization Bureau).

  The first postrevolutionary Politburo elected by the Central Committee (at the time with twenty-one members) was instructed by the Eighth Party Congress on March 25, 1919, to establish three institutions to carry on the growing work of the Communist Party. Lenin felt the Central Committee was too large, and he agreed to the creation of the Political Bureau, or Politburo, initially with five members. The Politburo became the key inner circle of the most influential leaders in the new regime. In addition to Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky, it included Lev Kamenev and Nikolai Krestinskii, with candidate members Nikolai Bukharin, Mikhail Kalinin, and Grigory Zinoviev. At the same Central Committee meeting, they also created the Orgburo, also with five members, one of whom was Stalin. It was responsible for lower-level Party and governmental organizations and dealt with personnel. A new secretariat was to have five technical secretaries to deal with routine matters, but eventually it became a key institution in charge of central administration.12

  Yakov Sverdlov was the real creator of the Party apparatus, as he was a kind of one-man secretariat. He died on March 16, 1919, just prior to the Party congress. The Central Committee had to draw up the new Party institutions, partly in response to Sverdlov’s death. Until then, if there was a single creator of the Party machine, it was he and not Stalin. The latter was not particularly interested in technical matters and not the perfect “organization man.” He wanted to be like Lenin, his model, and “lead the party in great new revolutionary deeds at home and abroad.”13 Nevertheless, Stalin eventually turned out to be a hands-on leader. He spent long hours poring over administrative details and micromanaged the vast Soviet political and administrative system.

  Once the Politburo started meeting regularly, as it did under Lenin, it became a kind of “super-government” whose decisions “were supreme, higher than the law or the Constitution, which for this body were mere auxiliary instruments. For the citizens of the great state, the Politburo itself embodied the law. It also acquired from Lenin the rule of total secrecy.”14

  Lenin pursued his goals vigorously, especially during the first months of the revolution. He was the key figure on the Politburo and in the Central Committee during the period of greatest upheaval, sent off notes to comrades in the field urging them on, and additionally wrote endless articles for the press. As chairman of Sovnarkom, the Council of People’s Commissars, he was head of government, even though he rejected “bourgois” titles like premier or president. A sense of his devotion to the cause can be gathered from the fact that up until July 27, 1918, he missed only 7 of SNK’s first 173 sessions. Meetings were held in the mornings. Often, a second gathering would take place in the evening and last late into the night. Inevitably the heavy workload and strain of the Revolution and Civil War adversely affected Lenin’s shaky health, which declined further as he recuperated after the assassination attempt in August 1918. He tried to conceal his symptoms from those around him, but by mid-1921 his comrades in the Kremlin already knew he could not keep up the pace and pressed him to take an extensive leave. Nevertheless, his radical determination persisted, and, even from his country dacha, he made every effort to keep his hand in politics.15

  On April 3, 1922, Lenin organized Stalin’s appointment to what would become an important position in the Party as the new general secretary of the secretariat. Stalin was thus not just on the two main committees of the Central Committee—the Politburo and Orgburo—but headed the secretariat. These roles raised some eyebrows in the top reaches of the Party, where they worried about the concentration of so much power in one person’s hands. His three roles put him in an advantageous position to succeed Lenin. They might not have been enough by themselves, but with his political instincts Stalin proved far too much for any potential rival.16

  As Lenin’s health deteriorated, he grew frustrated with Stalin, but still had more confidence in him than in anyone else and swore him to the most important task of all: he made Stalin promise to provide poison if and when he asked for it. Lenin did not want to become totally infirm and preferred not to drag out his life. He had a massive stroke on May 25, 1922, and a few days later again called Stalin to his side in Gorky, where he had been recovering. He now asked for the poison, but the request was too much for Stalin, who talked it over with Lenin’s wife and Nikolai Bukharin, who was also there. They prevailed on Lenin to hold on.17

  Stalin was still close to Lenin, as is shown by the log of visitors to Gorky for May 25 to October 2, 1922. He was at Lenin’s side no fewer than twelve times and was the most frequent visitor. They exchanged notes on all kinds of issues.18

  One of the concerns that came to separate the two had to do with the touchy nationality question in the new republic. In the summer of 1922 the country consisted of the Russian Federal Republic (which had its own “autonomous” republics), and Russia was linked in turn through bilateral treaties to Ukraine, Byelorussia, and the Transcaucasian Federation. Moscow wanted to put this arrangement on a more formalrational basis and in August 1922 set up a commission, chaired by Stalin as commissar of nationalities. He concluded it would be best if all the republics were governed from Moscow in the same way that Moscow governed its own “autonomous” republics. The already existing central Russian institutions would simply be extended to rule all the republics.

  Lenin called Stalin in on September 26 because he did not like this proposal. The next day he wrote that he wanted the new state to be run along less centralized lines and preferred a separate federal executive committee. Merely extending the existing commissariats of the Russian Federation to the rest of the Soviet Union as a whole, as Stalin wanted, would give the impression that Russia had subjugated the country, including independent Soviet republics like Ukraine and Georgia.

  Lenin sought a more open-ended federation that might soon include the Soviet republics of Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Finland. He did not wish the internal and those external (future) Communist republics to feel conquered by Russia. He proposed what became the USSR, in which the Russian Federal Republic would be one among many other “independent” republics. Lenin wanted to create a new level of federation and to appeal to the sense that nations wanted self-determination and should be able to have it inside an ever-expanding USSR. In theory it could expand to govern every country in Europe as each embraced Communism. Stalin believed in this missionary goal as well, but he did not think it was in the cards for the time being. He was realistic enough to see that revolutions were not imminent across Europe as Lenin hoped they were and muttered that the great man was wrong and “hasty” in his judgments. 19

  The differences between the two should not be exaggerated, because they were based mainly on tactical considerations. Lenin and Stalin were as one on the most important principles, namely “their commitment to the one-party, one-ideology, multinational state.”20 Such autonomy as was granted to the individual republics in the USSR was in any case a mere fig leaf behind which the Politburo of the Party in Moscow made all the main decisions.

  Hence members of the ruling inner circle were surprised at some of Lenin’s heated language and his attacks on them as well, and tended to see his reaction as a symptom of his illness. Stalin disagreed with Lenin but in deference reworked the proposal, and adjustments were incorporated into a charter of the USSR proclaimed on December 30, 1922, and later enshrined in the constitution.21

  Even when he was seriously ill, Lenin revealed a bloody-minded attitude. In November 1922, for example, he wrote Stalin about the need to use the GPU for more “cleansing” operations against the intelligentsia. He worried that in his absence, the Politburo was not being repressive enough. The letter shows Lenin’s persistent determination to use terror against any sign of “opposition.” His penciled note to Stalin went through a whole list of political opponents by name. He wanted to know whether this individual or that had been “uprooted,” which is to s
ay deported or exiled. He wanted to expel the lot.

  Lenin liked creating “lists” of people in and out of favor and felt buoyed up by “cleansings” or purges. He asked for a list of all political “enemies” who should be “expelled abroad without mercy. We will cleanse Russia for a long time to come. This has to be done at once.” He ended by ordering the “arrest of several hundred” writers and publishers, who would not be told the charges against them. Stalin immediately penciled in his own instructions for action and passed the note to Dzerzhinsky of the GPU.22

  On December 13, 1922, Lenin called Stalin to his home for what would be their last meeting. He may have had second thoughts about Stalin at the end but never really trusted any of the other leaders, either. On December 16 he had another stroke, and three days later the Central Committee put Stalin in charge of supervising his medical care.

  As Lenin’s health took a turn for the worse, Stalin, together with Bukharin, Kamenev, and his doctors, decided he should not be allowed even to dictate notes for more than a few minutes a day. An enfeebled Lenin lived on for thirteen long months and during that time refused to meet with any of the Party leaders.

  LENIN’S LAST TESTAMENT

  Lenin was already a troubled man by the end of 1921. He stayed at meetings only a short time, and as he would find out later, the real decisions were taken after he left. But he wanted to determine the fate of Soviet Communism following his death and on December 23, 1922, began dictating guidelines for the future to his secretary, Lydia Fotieva. These cryptic notes are usually called his “testament.”