Lenin
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2. Publish their names.
3. Extract all grain from them.
4. Designate hostages, in accordance with yesterday’s telegram.
Do this in such a way that for hundreds of miles around the narod sees, thrills, knows, cries out: they are strangling and will strangle the bloodsucker kulaks.
Telegraph receipt and implementation.
Yours, Lenin
PS: Find people who are tougher.33
Why did Lenin insist that ‘the interest of the revolution as a whole’ demanded this grisly display of violence? His primary motivation was the food-supply crisis, that is, the need to feed people living in the cities, soldiers in the army and even those peasants who lived in the grain-deficit areas of Russia. From the outbreak of war in 1914 food-supply difficulties had been the motor that drove the unrelenting economic breakdown. Lack of exchange items, transportation problems and local embargoes had led to severe food shortages, and these in turn led to further economic, social and political dislocation. The Bolshevik’s two predecessor governments – the tsarist and Provisional Government – had both moved steadily toward compulsory delivery of surpluses as a solution to the crisis. Surpluses (izlishki) were defined as all grain above a certain amount that was reserved for the peasant’s own consumption and sowing.
All three regimes of the period – tsarist, Provisional Government and Bolshevik – strove to use material incentives to obtain grain, but all three were willing to use force to ensure delivery by grain producers. The tsarist and Provisional Government each collapsed, in large part due to their ineffective food-supply policies, and their collapse only further intensified the direness of Russia’s situation. The Bolsheviks had to come up with an effective response or they too would join their predecessors in the dustbin of history.
The sharpness of the crisis was intensified in summer 1918 by the consequences of the Brest-Litovsk treaty and the incipient civil war. Crucial grain-surplus regions – Ukraine, Volga, Siberia, North Caucasus – were cut off by German occupation and hostilities in the Volga region. Under these circumstances any grain-surplus region that remained under Bolshevik control became crucial, and so the Bolsheviks pinned their survival hopes on provinces like Penza. In August 1918 Lenin dashed off many telegrams on food-supply policy that show him desperately trying to get grain by any means. Providing bonuses for prompt delivery was the central strategy: ‘Give out bonuses to counties and villages in the form of equipment, money for schools and hospitals and, in general, predominantly for such aims.’ Lenin urged helping with the harvest, plus extensive agitation efforts to explain why the grain was needed. He hoped to get grain from former landowner estates that were now state farms run by poor peasants. He also demanded the taking of hostages ‘from among the rich’ and other applications of force to ensure compulsory deliveries. To cite only Lenin’s telegrams that mandate the use of bonuses as material incentives would of course be seriously misleading. To cite only his telegrams demanding the use of force is equally misleading.34
The repression that Lenin demanded in the telegram to Penza was occasioned by a peasant uprising in protest against compulsory food-supply deliveries that broke out on 5 August 1918. Peasants in the village of Kuchi killed five Red Army soldiers and three members of the local soviet. The rebellion spread to other villages close by. All this was happening 45 kilometres from the civil-war front, which partly explains Lenin’s panicky response. Despite Lenin’s demands for a hundred hangings, the rebellion was quelled by August 12 by shooting thirteen ringleaders in the village of Kuchi for being directly responsible for the deaths of state representatives.
Do we need to resort to Lenin’s individual personality or to his ideological scenario in order to explain his demand in the Penza telegram for grisly reprisals against violent rebellion? Neither explanation seems likely, as shown by similar actions taken by people who did not share Lenin’s personality or his ideology, but who did share his objective problem, namely, establishing a new political authority in conditions of social chaos and economic breakdown. One non-Bolshevik activist, A. V. Peshekhonov, later recalled waking up one morning in Rostov under one of the anti-Bolshevik White governments and finding corpses hanging from the lampposts all over town, by order of the government.35
Nevertheless, knowledge of Lenin’s heroic scenario is needed to make full sense of the Penza telegram. Lenin insists that the narod should see the hangings. Why? to terrorize them? Not in Lenin’s mind. Lenin was convinced that the narod hated the ‘blood sucker kulaks’ and would praise the worker vlast for taking them on. The executions were meant as a form of inspiring class leadership. As such, they played a part in a narrative that Lenin was telling himself and others in autumn 1918. According to Lenin, civil-war battles had provoked kulak uprisings such as the one in Penza and these in turn accelerated the workings of his heroic scenario. Lenin’s long-held scenario outlined, first, a political revolution against the tsar in alliance with the whole peasantry and, second, a socialist revolution made possible by the urban proletariat’s growing influence over the rural proletariat and semi-proletariat. The revolution of October 1917 had been in alliance with the whole peasantry and thus, by the logic of Lenin’s own scenario, it was essentially a political rather than a true socialist revolution. Lenin’s loyalty to his scenario is shown by his eagerness in late 1918 to announce that kulak rebellions had kick-started a new phase of the revolution, one in which the kulak exploiters were finally sloughed off from the revolutionary coalition, thus allowing the workers to fight alongside only the exploited labourers in the village.
Lenin seems to be actually encouraged by this loss of a class ally. The heart of Marxism is the claim that only those who themselves are exploited can build socialism. The Russian revolution could therefore truly be called a socialist one only when the workers were allied with the exploited labourers in the countryside, and with no one else. Thus Lenin insisted in late 1918 that the class conflict taking place during in the most remote villages of Russia portended a revolution whose significance was ‘incomparably deeper and greater’ than the Bolshevik October revolution of 1917:
This [new phase of] struggle has cut off the property-owning and exploiting classes from the revolution completely; it definitely puts our revolution on the socialist road, just as the urban working class had tried so hard and vigorously to do in October [1917]. The working class will not be able to direct the revolution successfully along this road unless it finds firm, deliberate and solid support in the countryside.36
In his polemic against Kautsky written in autumn 1918 during his convalescence from the attempt on his life – Renegade Kautsky and the Proletarian Revolution – Lenin argued that the proletariat’s proven ability to ‘rally the village poor around itself against the rich peasants’ was a sign that Russia was in fact ripe for socialist revolution, contrary to Kautsky’s claim. The pre-war Kautsky – ‘Kautsky when he was a Marxist’ – understood this. Why did the renegade Kautsky of 1918 deny it, just when ‘things have turned out just as we said they would’?37 This reasoning convinced Lenin that food-supply difficulties were sparking ‘the last, final struggle’ with kulakdom (to use the apocalyptic words of the Internationale, the socialist hymn quoted in the Penza telegram). In reality, these same difficulties were prodding food-supply officials to make a much more pragmatic response. The attempt to use ‘class war in the villages’ to obtain grain had clearly backfired, causing a definite retreat toward new food-supply policies that aimed at meeting the peasant halfway. Lenin’s rhetoric fully caught up with these shifts only in 1919.
Lenin at his desk in the Kremlin in late 1918, after recovering from his wounds.
The second October that Lenin believed he saw going on in the countryside was not the only good news he received in late 1918. He ended his book-length polemic against ‘renegade Kautsky’ by writing:
The above lines were written on 9 November 1918. That same night news was received from Germany announcing the beginning of a
victorious revolution, first in Kiel and other northern towns and ports, where the vlast has passed into the hands of Soviets of worker and soldier deputies, then in Berlin, where, too, the vlast has passed into the hands of the Soviet.
The conclusion that still remained to be written to my pamphlet on Kautsky and on the proletarian revolution is now superfluous.38
The Bolsheviks were confident that a revolutionary chain-reaction starting in Germany was now unstoppable, a conviction hardly dented by the crushing of the radical socialist Spartacist rebellion in January 1919 and the murder of its leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. In March 1919 a hastily convened and not very representative meeting was held in Moscow to found the long-awaited Third International, which would consist solely of parties purified of any taint of opportunism. Lenin exultantly claimed that the world revolution was now moving forward with ‘the torrential might of millions and tens of millions of workers sweeping everything from their path’.39
Headlines in the Canadian newspaper The Globe, January 1919.
Krupskaya tells us that the news of the German revolution made the first anniversary of the revolution ‘some of the happiest days of Lenin’s life’. The British journalist Arthur Ransome, interviewing Lenin in early 1919, felt that ‘more than ever, Lenin struck me as a happy man… His whole faith is in the elemental forces that move people, his faith in himself is merely his belief that he justly estimates the direction of these forces.’40 In this mood of happy confidence, Lenin once again alluded to the frustrated dreams of his brother:
Comrades, behind us there is a long line of revolutionaries who sacrificed their lives for the emancipation of Russia. The lot of the majority of these revolutionaries was a hard one. They suffered the persecution of the tsarist government, but it was not their good fortune to see the triumph of the revolution. The happiness that has fallen to our lot is all the greater. Not only have we seen the triumph of our revolution, not only have we seen it become consolidated amidst unprecedented difficulties, creating a new kind of vlast and winning the sympathy of the whole world, but we are also seeing the seed sown by the Russian revolution springing up in Europe.41
March 1919: Lenin chairs the first congress of the new Third International in Moscow.
Lenin’s mood of optimism came only after a year of life-and-death crises. What we may call his ‘anniversary period’ started in autumn 1918 around the time of the first anniversary of the October revolution and lasted until summer 1919. In Lenin’s confident view during this period the Russian workers were leading the country down the road toward socialism. Despite all the difficulties and challenges, further progress down that road was guaranteed – at home by the class war in the villages, and abroad by the incipient socialist revolution. The heroic scenario of the proletariat as the vozhd of the narod was vindicated. As Lenin put it on 7 November 1918 at the unveiling of a monument in Moscow to Marx and Engels:
7 November 1918: Lenin marks the first anniversary of the 1917 revolution by giving a speech at the unveiling of a monument to Marx and Engels in Revolution Square, Moscow: ‘We are living through a happy time…’.
The great world-historic service of Marx and Engels is that they showed the workers of the world their role, their task, their mission, namely, to be the first to rise in the revolutionary struggle against capital and to unite around themselves in this struggle all working and exploited people.
We are living through a happy time, when this prophecy of the great socialists is beginning to be realized.42
5. Beyond the ‘Textbook à la Kautsky’
In early 1923, weeks before his final incapacitating stroke, Lenin wrote about Karl Kautsky for the last time: ‘It need hardly be said that a textbook written à la Kautsky [po kautskomu] was a very useful thing in its day. But it is time, for all that, to abandon the idea that it foresaw all the forms of development of subsequent world history. It would be timely to say that those who think so are simply fools.’1
The contrast between this dour assertion and Lenin’s mood during what I have termed his ‘anniversary period’ – late 1918 through summer 1919 – is striking. During the anniversary period Lenin called Kautsky a renegade because Kautsky was turning his back on his own earlier predictions just as they were coming true. But looking back in 1923 Lenin stated in effect that only a fool would claim (as he himself had done in 1918) that ‘things have turned out just as we said they would’.
Lenin’s heroic scenario had always been very strongly rooted in the ‘textbook à la Kautsky’ – orthodox ‘revolutionary Social Democracy’ of the Second International – and he had gloried in the fact. When and why did he move from his usual stance of aggressive unoriginality to one of reluctant originality? According to the most common account, Lenin’s rethinking began in early 1921 with the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP). Up to late 1920 (we are told) Lenin and the Bolsheviks were so carried away with a feeling of euphoria that they started to believe that harsh civil-war policies – later given the name of ‘war communism’ – represented a short cut or even a leap into full communism. Only economic collapse and peasant rebellion in the winter of 1920–21 convinced them of their mistake. Lenin finally began to understand that the peasants required material incentives in order to produce. The process of rethinking culminated in the bundle of articles and drafts from late 1922 and early 1923 that were later termed ‘Lenin’s testament’. Some writers view Lenin’s rethinking as fundamental, others as relatively superficial, but all tie it strongly to NEP.
The standard account is profoundly misleading. In reality Lenin’s rethinking began in 1919, just as soon as he realized that things were not ‘turning out just as we said they were’. There was no mass euphoria among the Bolsheviks in 1920, no collective hallucination that Russia was on the eve of full communism. On the contrary the Bolsheviks were painfully aware of the manifold compromises and defeats that were leading them away from socialism. The dramatic changes that came with the introduction of NEP in 1921 were just another round of painful compromises. Lenin’s outlook in his final writings can be traced back to concerns that began to surface in 1919.
In what follows we focus on Lenin’s personal evolution. Lenin had been very explicit about the Marxist justification for undertaking a socialist revolution in backward Russia. Abroad, the Russian revolution would spark off revolutions in more advanced countries. At home, the workers had moved beyond the alliance with the peasantry as a whole. Since they were now allied solely with the exploited labourers in the villages, they were free to move on from a merely democratic revolution to the socialist revolution. Lenin was equally insistent that ‘soviet democracy’ had the mission of utterly remaking the state apparatus by cleansing it of ‘bureaucratism’. He was therefore profoundly disappointed when he was forced to realize that these things were not happening – not in the short term, nor even in the medium term. Like a cartoon character who keeps walking in midair even though he has left the cliff behind, Lenin no longer had the solid basis of his original scenario to support his journey. He had to come up with an explanation of why Russia’s socialist revolution was not doomed to crash to the ground.
All through his life Lenin had always stressed the continuity of his views. He argued that the 1905 revolution vindicated the pre-revolutionary Iskra platform, that his wartime Left Zimmerwald platform did not deviate from Kautsky-when-he-was-a-Marxist, and that the October revolution had orthodox Marxist credentials. From 1919 he was forced to admit that some basic Bolshevik assumptions had not yet been vindicated, yet true to his lifelong habit he minimized the extent of the necessary modifications. In the 1923 article quoted above, he characterized his changes to the ‘textbook à la Kautsky’ as ‘certain amendments (quite insignificant from the stand point of the general development of world history)… certain distinguishing features… certain partial innovations… somewhat unusual conditions… such details of development (from the standpoint of world history they were certainly details) as the Brest
-Litovsk peace, the New Economic Policy, and so forth’.2
To understand the adjustments that Lenin was forced to make to his heroic scenario, we need to take a look at some of these ‘details of development’ that may have been small in the scale of world history but that loomed large in the scale of the few years remaining to Lenin.
The Challenge of Events
From many points of view Bolshevik survival was a miracle and Lenin felt that, no matter what else was urged against Bolshevism, the survival of the proletarian vlast was a bottom-line justification for the great deed of October 1917. Yet he could not hide from himself that some fundamental expectations had not been met.
Between 1918 and 1922 there were so many challenges to Bolshevik rule that it is perhaps better to speak of ‘civil wars’ in the plural. The Whites, who relied principally on the elite classes of tsarist Russia, were led by former officers such as Admiral Kolchak in Siberia and General Denikin in south Russia. Peasant rebels, collectively called the Greens, mounted a series of revolts both local and large-scale. National minorities in the border regions also took advantage of the temporary breakdown of central authority to declare independence. Some were successful (Poland, Finland, Baltic states); others were reincorporated into Soviet Russia. Finally, foreign powers such as France, the United States and Japan intervened in the hope of toppling Bolshevism.
Given the many challenges to its existence, the most crucial accomplishment of the new government was the creation of the Red Army out of the ruins of the old Imperial army. The Red Army was a most improbable institution. The Bolsheviks – a radical working-class party that strongly opposed militarism and preached defeatism before the revolution – not only had to turn themselves into military commanders but also had to work together with tsarist military officers and peasant recruits in order to build an effective fighting machine.
In the vivid phrase of eyewitness Arthur Ransome, the Bolsheviks had ‘illusion after illusion scraped from them by the pumice-stone of experience’.3 Informed outsiders, each writing before the introduction of NEP in 1921, detailed the failure of Lenin’s three basic justifications during this period. The American socialist Morris Hillquit detailed the disappointing record of international revolution: