Lenin
Page 14
Only when the Sparticide risings in Germany were quelled [in early 1919] and the Hungarian Soviet government was overthrown [in mid-1919]; when the great struggle in the Italian metal industry was settled by mutual concessions, and the oft-announced general strikes in England systematically failed to materialize; when the spirit of unrest and rebellion engendered by the war and the Versailles ‘settlement’ was succeeded by a state of sullen apathy, and the capitalist world settled down to a spell of heavy political reaction, only then did the Communists begin to lose faith in an imminent world revolution.4
Socialist transformation in the countryside also came up short. As émigré Russian economist Leo Pasvolsky drily observed about hopes for a significant movement toward collective agricultural production, the Bolsheviks ‘made attempts to produce new agrarian forms, but they did not expect any great success out of them and did not achieve any success’.5 Pasvolsky was no doubt correct about the expectations of the Bolsheviks in general, but Lenin himself had started off with more sanguine hopes about what could be accomplished during and even because of the wartime economic emergency.
William Walling (the American socialist whose interview with Lenin after the 1905 revolution was quoted in chapter Three) was equally dismissive about Bolshevik attempts to remake the state apparatus when he derided ‘the inability of a party consisting almost wholly of agitators, propagandists and self-appointed shepherds of the proletariat to furnish any administrative, technical or constructive talents’.6
All three of these contemporaneous observers were hostile to Bolshevism. Yet, as we shall see, Lenin did not deny these disappointments and indeed, in certain moods, could be even more scathing about them.
In early 1921, when the Bolsheviks introduced the New Economic Policy or NEP, the Soviet government carried out a series of dramatic reversals of economic policy. Private trade in grain was legalized or, perhaps better, decriminalized, while state industry was forced to work for the market and to adopt ‘capitalist’ methods. These changes roughly coincided with the end of hostilities, the signing of peace and trade treaties and the consequent demobilization of the Red Army. The dramatic introduction of NEP has also created a tendency to see the year 1921 as the end of the Russian’s prolonged time of troubles. But in many respects the real year of transition was 1922, a time when Russia finally emerged from the long years of collapse and breakdown and the Bolshevik party stopped reeling from the rapid changes resulting from the introduction and then the unplanned extension of NEP in 1921. A closer look at 1922 will give us a better idea of the context of Lenin’s final evolution.
The rebellion of what used to be the enthusiastically loyal garrison at Kronstadt helped concentrate the minds of the Bolshevik leadership on the need to introduce the New Economic Policy in early 1921. Taken on 22 March 1921, this photograph shows Lenin and Trotsky (standing front centre) with delegates of the Tenth Party Congress who participated in crushing the rebellion.
After years of economic degradation a drought in 1921 set off an intense famine that provided the climax to the horror and devastation of the civil war. Russia could hardly have coped with this famine without the benign intervention of foreign aid, particularly by the American Relief Agency (ARA). At the beginning of 1922 the country was still completely in the grip of this famine. By the end of the year the worst was over and the country was beginning to revive. The change can be traced in a small book appropriately entitled Plague, Pestilence and Famine. It consists of letters from a British nurse, Muriel Payne, who spent March–September 1922 in the famine region along the Volga. At the beginning of the book, Payne is confronted with something out of Dante’s Inferno:
The chaos of the whole country is indescribable. No one seems to know anything, or to do anything. The population is a seething mass of louse-covered, ragged humanity, who, apparently, have no purpose left in life. They all move slowly and listlessly about, the reigning law being, ‘It is yours, take it’. But there is no nothing left to take, so they just sit down and die.7
One story will give the flavour of the heartbreaking realities:
We came across a barn full of dead people. They were not just heaped up, but were carefully arranged like waxwork figures – some standing, some sitting, and some had tumbled down as the thaw had set in. In the hand of each was a piece of paper with the name of the person and a recommendation from the priest to St Peter to allow them through when he had time to attend to it.8
During the time of Payne’s stay, the country began to crawl out of the abyss, as shown by the contrast in Moscow’s appearance at the beginning and end of her time in Russia:
Moscow, March 1922: ‘Everything is indescribably miserable and sordid. Streets look as though they have never been streets. Houses are falling to bits – ruins of the Revolution. There is a continuous stream of ragged, silent men and women, an occasional horse and sleigh, or a motor car flying the red flag…. There are no shops worth mentioning.’9
Moscow, September 1922: ‘Moscow is a different place since I was here six months ago. Shops are open and apparently flourishing, there is plenty of food (at exorbitant prices) for those who can afford to buy. Trams are running, opera playing, and people are much better dressed. You can get quite a fair dinner for 20 million roubles!’10
Payne rather enjoyed herself at a parade for ‘young Communists’ and even managed to join the procession. She reports that ‘Lloyd George was burnt in the evening, for what particular sin I don’t know’.
It was altogether a strange sight; but rather fine to see the men, women and children in rags marching side by side with better dressed people. There was something striking, too, about the simplicity of it all – the ‘Grand Stand’ (a small wooden platform holding all the Bolsheviks packed together like sardines), so crowded and uncomfortable, with only a chair for the speaker to stand on to raise him above the shoulders of the rest.11
Payne’s attitude toward the Bolsheviks is mixed. She is bemused that a starving country is still obsessed with preventing one peasant from hiring another. She observes that ‘the power of Moscow does not extend very far in practice – 200 miles perhaps beyond the city’. Nevertheless, she is impressed that ‘whatever the reason, after travelling more than two thousand miles across Russia, one cannot help being struck with the comparative law and order exhibited by this population of millions under the rule of party of less than 500,000 men’. She finally divided the party into two: the idealists who ‘not only dream of a glorious and happy Russia, but who work for her good with no pay, no thanks, no holidays, no health; who still hope, and, I believe, still pray, and realize to the depths of their being the sorrows of the people’ vs. the ‘violent men, nominally their colleagues’.12
May Day 1920: to Lenin’s left is his old comrade Lev Kamenev.
Lenin’s Health
After Lenin’s train trip from Petrograd to Moscow his life of peregrinations was over. The dramatic changes in his personal situation no longer came from enforced moves from place to place but rather from his deteriorating health. The final evolution in his outlook must be seen against the background of his growing awareness that his days were numbered.
The wear and tear of life begins to tell on Lenin, seen here at the funeral of his brother-in-law Mark Elizarov in March 1919.
All his working life Lenin was prone to overwork and to over-involvement with tense political issues, leading to nerves, headaches and insomnia.13 Fortunately, he had always been able to regain his spiritual equilibrium by means of vacations, energetic walks in the mountains and a quiet family life. After becoming head of state in 1917 these safety valves were no longer available in the same way. Looking back, he ironically thanked his political enemies, since their accusation of his being a German spy in 1917 forced him into hiding and thus gave him his last real vacation.
Indications of the brain troubles that eventually finished him off were already cutting into Lenin’s working habits by late 1920. By August 1921 he wrote to Maxim Gorky that
‘I am so tired that I can’t do a damned thing’.14 Headaches, insomnia and inability to concentrate continued to make serious inroads into Lenin’s workaholic ways. In December 1921 a week’s vacation at his dacha residence in Gorki stretched out longer and longer, until finally the Politburo insisted that he take a vacation for six weeks. Lenin was able to return to work and to participate in the 11th Party Congress in March 1922, although he was very upset by his reduced ability to read documents and to meet with congress delegates. He later referred to his fainting spells during this period as ‘the first bell’ (at the third bell, the train leaves).
Whether the underlying problem was his health or the political contradictions of NEP Russia, 1922 was marked by particularly irritable and aggressive outbursts on Lenin’s part that seemed to be aimed at permanently silencing independent views. The most egregious of these attempts were threats of violence against the Orthodox Church and the exile of many prominent socialist and non-socialist intellectuals.15
Lenin’s doctors still had very little sense of the seriousness of his illness, and only after his first stroke on 27 May 1922 were its full dimensions glimpsed. This stroke temporarily took away his ability to speak clearly or write legibly. Lenin was profoundly pessimistic after his first stroke and assumed that the end had come. He was essentially correct about this, although temporary improvements gave him a few more months of work. He remembered that a peasant had once predicted that his life would end by means of a kondrashka (an old word for stroke). The peasant based his diagnosis on the fact that Lenin’s neck was ‘awfully short’.
Lenin also felt, based on his own observations, that professional revolutionaries tended to burn out by around the age of fifty. He recalled the double suicide of Paul and Laura Lafargue in 1911. With this example in front of him, Lenin now contemplated suicide. On 30 May 1922 he demanded to see Stalin at his dacha in Gorki. Stalin and Bukharin drove out, and Stalin saw Lenin alone for just a few minutes. While he was waiting, Bukharin remarked to Lenin’s sister Maria that he guessed the reason why Ilich wanted to see Stalin. Stalin came out of Lenin’s room visibly shaken. While walking to the car, he conferred with Bukharin and Maria (while requesting that Krupskaya not be told). Lenin had reminded Stalin of a previous promise to help him in the case of paralysis, and he now wanted to call in his promise. He asked Stalin to obtain cyanide pills.
As the three talked near the car, Stalin was seized with doubts: ‘I promised to do it in order to calm him, but what if he interprets my words as meaning that things really are hopeless?’ So it was decided that Stalin would return and reassure Lenin that the doctors were optimistic, that Lenin would recover, and that the time to fulfil his request had not yet arrived. Lenin agreed, although as Stalin left Lenin said to him, ‘are you playing games with me? [Lukavil?]’. Stalin answered, ‘when have you ever seen me play games with you?’16
And in fact Lenin did improve, though several months passed before he was even allowed visitors. In August and September he was receiving political visits at Gorki and preparing for a return to work, which he did on 2 October. For the rest of the autumn months Lenin worked at a fairly intense pace. During this period he had disagreements with various Politburo members, including Stalin and Trotsky, but these disagreements were settled without disrupting the usual working relationships.
In late November Lenin evidently sensed that the end was rapidly approaching and that the time had come to bequeath a final statement to the party. He therefore asked to be sent a copy of the ‘Political Testament’ of Friedrich Engels.17 On 15 December 1922 Lenin had his second stroke. He could no longer write legibly and could only communicate orally or by means of dictation (a procedure he strongly disliked). On the eve of this stroke he had already begun to ‘liquidate’ his various ongoing files and to dispose of the books in his personal library. Books on agriculture went to his sister Maria, books on education, scientific organization of labour and production propaganda went to Krupskaya, belles-lettres were to be held until needed, while he reserved for himself political writings, memoirs and biographies.18 Cut off from current affairs, restricted to a few minutes of dictation a day, Lenin could influence affairs only by writing a few final articles.
Lenin relaxing at Gorki, summer 1922.
Lenin’s writings in the period December 1922 to March 1923 consist not only of articles published at the time but of various secret dictations that only came to light later. The precise intention of these secret writings is very difficult to assess and has given rise to long-standing controversies. Unfortunately, these controversies have deflected attention from the content of the articles that we know Lenin wanted to be published. These final articles contain Lenin’s last thoughts on the three vulnerable points of his heroic scenario – international revolution, peasant support for socialist transformation, and remaking the state apparatus – and as such they arise organically out of the shift in outlook that began in 1919. In order to bring this out I will pass over the issue of Lenin’s secret writings and examine his reaction to the three challenges, starting in 1919 and continuing on to early 1923.
Holding Out
Lenin’s happy confidence in early 1919 about international revolution comes out in an interview conducted by the sympathetic Arthur Ransome. Ransome reported that Lenin ‘was entirely convinced that England was on the eve of revolution, and pooh-poohed my objections… “Strikes and Soviets. If these two habits once get hold, nothing will keep the workmen from them. And Soviets, once started, must sooner or later come to supreme power”.’19 When Ransome stated that he did not believe there would be a revolution in Britain, Lenin responded:
We have a saying that a man may have typhoid while still on his legs. Twenty, maybe thirty years ago I had abortive typhoid, and was going about with it, had had it some days before it knocked me over. Well, England and France and Italy have caught the disease already. England may seem to you to be untouched, but the microbe is already there.20
A year later, Lenin had talk with another visiting Englishman, Bertrand Russell, and was distinctly less sanguine. He outlined to Russell the strategy he wanted British Communists to adopt: support the election of a Labour government in the hopes that its inaction would radicalize the masses – a strategy obviously extrapolated from his own experience in 1917. When Russell opined that ‘whatever is possible in England can be achieved without bloodshed, [Lenin] waved aside the suggestion as fantastic’. Nevertheless, Lenin ‘admitted that there is little chance of revolution in England now, and that the working man is not yet disgusted with Parliamentary Government’.21
Lenin speaks at the Second Congress of the Communist International, July 1920. Seated to Lenin’s left is Karl Radek.
The delay in international revolution forced Lenin to be more cautious in his predictions of ‘steps toward socialism’ at home. In early 1919, despite the huge challenges that threatened the survival of the Bolshevik government, Lenin could still assure his audiences that ‘this is the last difficult half-year’ because ‘the international situation has never been so good’.22 He was particularly cheered by the revolution that broke out in Hungary in March 1919. As a ‘more cultured country’ than Russia, Hungary would show the socialist revolution in a better light, ‘without the violence, without the bloodshed that was forced upon us by the Kerenskys and the imperialists’.23
Lenin’s optimism could not be sustained. The defeat of the Hungarian revolution in August 1919 marks a turning-point in his rhetoric about international revolution. By early 1921, on the eve of NEP, he dolefully noted that the West European workers had failed to take advantage of the opportunity to ‘have done with the capitalists at one stroke’. As a result, ‘our main difficulties over the past four years have been due to the fact that the West European capitalists managed to bring the war to an end and stave off revolution’.24 Lenin accordingly adjusted his scenario in a number of ways. One method was to lower the definition of success. Yes, the Bolsheviks may have been over-sanguine about receivin
g ‘swift and direct support’ from the European proletariat, but they had managed to survive and this meant that they had been ‘correct on the most fundamental issues’:
Lenin consults with Nikolai Bukharin (centre) and Grigory Zinoviev during sessions of the Second Congress of the Comintern, summer 1920.
When we ask ourselves how this could have happened, how it could be that a state, undoubtedly one of the most backward and weakest, managed to repel the attacks of the openly hostile, most powerful countries in the world, when we try to examine this question, we see clearly that it was because we proved to be correct on the most fundamental issues. Our forecasts and calculations proved to be correct. It turned out that although we did not receive the swift and direct support of the working people of the world that we had counted on, and which we had regarded as the basis of the whole of our policy, we did receive support of another kind, which was not direct or swift, namely, the sympathy of the labouring masses – the workers and the peasants, the masses in the countryside – throughout the world, even in those states that are most hostile to us.25
Despite the absence of actual revolution Lenin insisted that the Soviet system remained an inspirational model to the exploited people of the world. He even boasted that Soviet Russia was winning support from capitalists – specifically, the capitalists of the small countries bordering Russia who signed trade treaties with the Bolsheviks despite pressure from the victorious great powers.26
However, Lenin did not waver in his conviction that actual international revolution was a necessary basis for rapid steps toward socialism in Russia itself. In one of his final articles of 1923 Lenin took heart that ‘Russia, India, China, etc.’ made up the vast majority of mankind and ‘this majority has been drawn into the struggle for liberation with extraordinary rapidity, so that in this respect there cannot be the slightest doubt what the final outcome of the world struggle will be. In this sense, the complete victory of socialism is fully and absolutely assured.’ All socialist Russia had to do was hold out (proderzhat’sia) until the final victory. In this article of five printed pages Lenin not only uses ‘hold out’ twice, but also employs words with related meanings and based on the same root (derzhat’) for a total of six more times.27