The Russian Revolution

by Richard Pipes

  Lenin returned to Moscow on October 14. On October 16, he attended a meeting of the Central Committee and the following day a session of the Sovnarkom. To assure the populace that he had fully recovered, motion-picture cameras were brought to the Kremlin courtyard and filmed him in conversation with Bonch-Bruevich. On October 22, Lenin made his first public appearance, after which he returned to full-time work.

  The most immediate effect of Kaplan’s attempt was the unleashing of a wave of terror which in its lack of discrimination and number of victims had no historic precedent. The Bolsheviks were thoroughly frightened, and acted exactly as Engels had said frightened people did: to reassure themselves they perpetrated useless cruelties.

  The assassination attempt and Lenin’s recovery had another consequence as well, in the long run perhaps no less important: it inaugurated a deliberate policy of deifying Lenin which after his death would turn into a veritable state-sponsored Oriental cult. Lenin’s rapid recovery from a near-fatal injury seems to have stirred among his lieutenants, prone to venerating him even before, a superstitious faith. Bonch-Bruevich cites with approval the remark of one of Lenin’s physicians that “only those marked by destiny can escape death from such a wound.”60 Although Lenin’s “immortality” was later exploited for very mundane political ends, to play on the superstitions of the masses, there is no reason to doubt that many Bolsheviks genuinely came to regard their leader as a supernatural being, a latter-day Christ sent to save humanity.*

  Until Fannie Kaplan’s attempt on his life, the Bolsheviks had been rather reticent about Lenin. In personal contact, they treated him with a deference in excess of that normally shown political leaders. Sukhanov was struck that in 1917, even before Lenin had taken power, his followers displayed “quite exceptional piety” toward him, like the “knights of the Holy Grail.”61 Lenin’s stature rose with each of his successes. As early as January 1918, Lunacharskii, one of the better-educated and more levelheaded of the Bolshevik luminaries, reminded Lenin that he no longer belonged to himself but to “mankind.”62 There were other early inklings of an incipient cult, and if the process of deification did not unfold as yet, it was because Lenin discouraged it. Thus, he stopped Soviet officials who wanted to enforce on his behalf tsarist laws savagely punishing the defacement of the ruler’s portrait.63 His peculiar vanity dissolved tracelessly in the “movement”: it received complete gratification from its successes without requiring a “personality cult.”

  Lenin was exceedingly modest in his personal wants: his living quarters, his food, his clothing were strictly utilitarian. He carried to an extreme the notorious indifference of the Russian intelligentsia for the finer things, leading even at the height of his power an austere, almost ascetic, style of life. He

  always wore the same dark-colored suit, with pipelike trousers that seemed a trifle too short for his legs, with a similarly abbreviated, single-breasted coat, a soft white collar, and an old tie. The necktie, in my opinion, was for years the same: black, with little white flowers, one particular spot showing wear.

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  Such simplicity, emulated by many later dictators, did not, however, preclude—and, indeed, perhaps even encouraged—the rise of a personality cult. Lenin was the first of the modern “demotic” leaders who, even while dominating the masses, in appearance and ostensible lifestyle remained one of them. This has been noted as a characteristic of contemporary dictatorships:

  In modern absolutisms the leader is not distinguished, as many former tyrants were, by the

  difference

  between himself and his subjects, but is, on the contrary, like the embodied essence of what they all have in common. The 20th-century tyrant is a “popular star” and his personal character is obscured …

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  Russian literature on Lenin published in 1917 and the first eight months of 1918 is surprisingly sparse.66 In 1917 most of what was written about him came from the pen of his opponents, and although the Bolshevik censorship soon put a stop to such hostile literature, the Bolsheviks themselves wrote little on their leader, who was hardly known outside the narrow circles of the radical intelligentsia. It was Fannie Kaplan’s shots that opened the floodgates of Leninist hagiography. As early as September 3–4, 1918, a paean to Lenin by Trotsky and Kamenev came out in an edition of one million copies.67 Zino-viev’s eulogy, around the same time, had a printing of 200,000, and a brief popular biography came out in 300,000 copies. According to Bonch-Bruevich, Lenin terminated this outpouring as soon as he recovered,68 although he allowed it to resume on a more modest scale in 1920, in connection with his fiftieth birthday and the end of the Civil War. By 1923, however, when Lenin’s health forced him to withdraw from active politics, Leninist hagiography turned into an industry, employing thousands, much as did the painting of religious ikons before the Revolution.

  On the present-day reader this literature makes an odd impression: its sentimental, mawkish, worshipful tone contrasts sharply with the brutal language which the Bolsheviks liked to affect in other walks of life. The image of the Christ-like savior of mankind, descended from the cross and then resurrected, is difficult to reconcile with the theme of a “merciless struggle” against his enemies. Thus Zinoviev, who had mocked the “bourgeoisie” as fit to eat straw, could describe Lenin as the “apostle of world communism” and “leader by the grace of God,” much as Mark Antony in his funeral oration for Caesar had extolled him as a “god in the sky.”69 Other Communists exceeded even this hyperbole, one poet calling Lenin “the invincible messenger of peace, crowned with the thorns of slander.” Such allusions to the new Christ were common in Soviet publications in late 1918, which the authorities distributed in massive editions while massacring hostages by the thousands.70

  There was, of course, no formal deification of the Soviet leader, but the qualities attributed to him in official publications and pronouncements—omniscience, infallibility, and virtual immortality—amounted to nothing less. The “cult of genius” went further in Soviet Russia in regard to Lenin (not to speak of Stalin later on) than the subsequent adoration of Mussolini and Hitler, for which it provided the model.

  Why this quasi-religious cult of a politician by a regime espousing materialism and atheism? To this question there are two answers, one having to do with the internal needs of the Communist Party, the other with the relationship of that party to the people whom it ruled.

  Although they claimed to be a political party, the Bolsheviks were really nothing of the kind. They resembled rather an order or cohort gathered around a chosen leader. What held them together was not a program or a platform—these could change from one day to the next in conformity with the leader’s wishes—but the person of the leader. It was his intuition and his will that guided the Communists, not objective principles. Lenin was the first political figure of modern times to be addressed as “leader” (vozhd’). He was indispensable, for without his guidance the one-party regime had nothing to hold it together. Communism repersonalized politics, throwing it back to the times when human will rather than law directed state and society. This required its leader to be immortal, if not literally then figuratively: he had to lead in person, and after he was gone, his followers had to be able to rule in his name and claim to receive direct inspiration from him. The slogan “Lenin Lives!” launched after Lenin’s death was, therefore, no mere propagandistic catch-phrase, but an essential ingredient of the Communist system of government.

  This accounts in good measure for the need to deify Lenin, to raise him above the vagaries of ordinary human existence, to make him immortal. His cult began the instant he was believed to stand on the threshold of death and became institutionalized five years later when he actually died. Lenin’s inspiration was essential to maintain the vitality and indestructibility of the party and the state which he had founded.

  The other consideration had to do with the regime’s lack of legitimacy. This had not been a problem in the first months of the Bolshevik regime when it had
acted as a catalyst of world revolution. But once it became clear that there would be no world revolution anytime soon and that the Bolshevik regime would have to assume responsibility for administering a large, multinational empire, the requirements changed. At this point, the loyalty of Soviet Russia’s seventy-odd million inhabitants under its control became a matter of grave concern. This loyalty the Bolsheviks could not secure by ordinary electoral procedures: at the height of their popularity, in November 1917, they won less than one-quarter of the vote, and they certainly would have gained only a fraction of that later on, after disenchantment had set in. In their hearts, the Bolsheviks knew that their authority rested on physical force embodied in a thin layer of workers and soldiers of questionable commitment and staying power. It could not escape them that in July 1918, when their regime came under assault from the Left SRs, the workers and soldiers in the capital city declared “neutrality” and refused to help.

  Under these conditions, the deification of the founding father served the Bolsheviks as the next-best thing to true legitimacy and a surrogate for the missing popular mandate. Historians of antiquity have noted that in the Middle East, institutionalized cults of rulers began on a large scale only after Alexander of Macedon had conquered diverse non-Greek peoples over whom he could not claim legitimate authority, and who, furthermore, were bound neither to the Macedonians nor to each other by bonds of ethnic identity. Alexander, and even more so his successors, as well as the Roman emperors, had recourse to self-deification as a device for securing with appeals to celestial authority that which terrestrial authority refused to grant them:

  The successors of Alexander were Greek Macedonians who occupied, by right of conquest and force of arms, thrones usurped from autochthonous sovereigns. In these countries of ancient and refined civilization, the power of the sword was not everything and the law of the stronger might not have provided adequate legitimation. For sovereigns, in general, love to legitimize themselves, because this often means reinforcing their position. Was it not wise on their part to present themselves as the titled heirs of these powers based on divine right, the heritage of which they had captured? To identify themselves as gods—was this not a way, presumed clever, to reap the veneration of their subjects, to unite their disparate populations under the same banner, and, in the ultimate analysis, to consolidate their dynastic position?

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  To a dynasty … deification meant legitimacy, the regularizing of right acquired by the sword. It meant, further, the elevation of the royal family above the ambition of men who had recently been their peers, the strengthening of the rights of sovereigns by fusing them in a single whole with the prerogatives of their divine predecessors, the presentation to subjects everywhere of a symbol round which they might, perchance, rally through religious sentiment since they could not do so through their national sentiment.

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  How conscious the Bolsheviks were of these precedents and how aware of the conflict between their pretense at being “scientific” and their appeals to the most primitive craving for idol worship, it is difficult to tell. The chances are that they acted instinctively. If so, their instincts served them well, for these appeals proved much more successful in winning them mass support than all the talk of “socialism,” “class struggle,” and the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” To the people of Russia “dictatorship” and “proletariat” were meaningless foreign words that most of them could not even pronounce. But the tales of the miraculous rise from the dead of the country’s ruler evoked an instant emotional response and created something of a bond between the government and its subjects. This is why the cult of Lenin would never be abandoned, even if, for a time, it would be eclipsed by the state-fostered cult of another deity, Stalin.*

  The Bolsheviks had practiced terror from the day they seized power, intensifying it as their power grew and their popularity declined. The arrest of the Kadets in November 1917, followed by the unpunished murder of the Kadet leaders Kokoshkin and Shingarev had been acts of terror, as was the closing of the Constituent Assembly and the shooting of the demonstrators marching in its support. The Red Army troops and Red Guards who in the spring of 1918 dispersed and manhandled, in one city after another, the soviets that had voted the Bolsheviks out of power, perpetrated acts of terror. The executions, mainly carried out by provincial and district Chekas under the mandate given them by Lenin’s decree of February 22, 1918, pushed terror to a still higher level of intensity: the historian S. Melgunov, then residing in Moscow, compiled from the press evidence of 882 executions in the first six months of 1918.73

  Early Bolshevik terror, however, was unsystematic, rather like the terror of the Whites later on in the Civil War, and many of its victims were ordinary criminals as well as “speculators.” It began to assume a more systematic political character only in the summer of 1918, when Bolshevik fortunes sank to their lowest. Following the suppression of the Left SR uprising on July 6, the Cheka carried out its first mass executions, the victims of which were members of Savinkov’s secret organization, arrested the previous month, and some participants in the Left SR uprising. The expulsion of the Left SRs from the Cheka Collegium in Moscow removed the last restraints on the political police. In the middle of July, many officers who had taken part in the Iaroslavl uprising were shot. Frightened of military conspiracies, the Cheka now began to hunt down officers of the old army and execute them without trial. According to Melgunov’s records, in the month of July 1918 alone, the Bolshevik authorities, mainly the Cheka, carried out 1,115 executions.74

  The murder of the Imperial family and their relatives represented a further escalation of terror. Cheka agents now arrogated to themselves the right to shoot prisoners and suspects at will, although judging by subsequent complaints from Moscow, the provincial authorities did not always make use of their powers.

  Notwithstanding this intensification of government terror, Lenin was still dissatisfied. He wanted to involve the “masses” in such action, presumably because pogroms which involved both agents of the government and the people helped bring the two closer together. He kept on badgering Communist officials and the citizenry to act more resolutely and rid themselves of all inhibitions against killings. How else could “class war” turn into reality? As early as January 1918, he complained that the Soviet regime was “too gentle”: he wanted “iron power,” whereas it was “inordinately soft, at every step more like jelly than iron.”75 When told in June 1918 that party officials in Petrograd had restrained workers from carrying out a pogrom to avenge the assassination of Volodarskii, he fired off an indignant letter to his viceroy there. “Comrade Zinoviev!” he wrote:

  The Central Committee has learned only today that in Petrograd

  workers

  wanted to react to the murder of Volodarskii with mass terror and that you (not you personally but the Petrograd Central Committee or Regional Committee) held them back. I protest decisively! We compromise ourselves: even in Soviet resolutions we threaten mass terror, and when it comes to action, we

  impede

  the

  entirely

  correct revolutionary initiative of the masses. This is im-per-mis-si-ble!

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  Two months later, Lenin instructed the authorities in Nizhnii Novgorod to “introduce at once mass terror, execute and deport hundreds of prostitutes, drunken soldiers, ex-officers, etc.”77 These terribly imprecise three letters—“etc.”—gave agents of the regime a free hand in selecting their victims: it was to be carnage for the sake of carnage as an expression of the indomitable “revolutionary will” of the regime, which was fast losing ground under its feet.

  Terror spread to the countryside in connection with the government’s declaration of war on the village. We have cited Lenin’s exhortations to the workers to kill “kulaks.” It is impossible to form even an approximate notion of the number of peasants who perished in the summer and fall of 1918 trying to save their grain from food detachments: given
that the victims on the government side ran into the thousands, they were unlikely to have been smaller.

  Lenin’s associates now vied with each other in using language of explicit brutality to incite the population to murder and to make murder committed for the cause of the Revolution appear noble and uplifting. Trotsky, for instance, on one occasion warned that if any of the ex-tsarist officers whom he drafted into the Red Army behaved treasonably, “nothing will remain of them but a wet spot.”78 The Chekist Latsis declared that the “law of the Civil War [was] to slaughter all the wounded” fighting against the Soviet regime: “It is a life-and-death struggle. If you do not kill, you will be killed. Therefore kill that you may not be killed.”79

  No such exhortation to mass murder was heard either in the French Revolution or on the White side. The Bolsheviks deliberately sought to brutalize their citizens, to make them look on some of their fellow citizens just as frontline soldiers look on those wearing enemy uniforms: as abstractions rather than human beings.

  This murderous psychosis had already attained a high pitch of intensity by the time bullets struck down Uritskii and Lenin. These two terrorist acts—as it turned out, unrelated, but at the time seen as part of an organized plot—unleashed the Red Terror in its formal sense. The majority of its victims were hostages chosen at random, mainly because of their social background, wealth, or connections with the old regime. The Bolsheviks considered these massacres necessary not only to suppress concrete threats to their regime but also to intimidate the citizens and force them into psychic submission.

  The Red Terror was formally inaugurated with two decrees, issued on September 4 and 5, over the signatures of the commissars of the Interior and of Justice.

  The first instituted the practice of taking hostages.* It was a barbarian measure, a reversion to the darkest of ages, which international tribunals after World War II would declare a war crime. The Cheka hostages were to be executed in reprisal for future attacks on Bolshevik leaders or any other active opposition to Bolshevik rule. In fact, they were lined up before firing squads around the clock. The official sanction for these massacres was given in the “Order Concerning Hostages” signed by Grigorii Petrovskii, the Commissar of the Interior, on September 4, 1918, one day before the Red Terror decree, and cabled to all provincial soviets: