Lenin

by Victor Sebestyen

  *3 Lenin, though it seems unlikely, insisted he had not seen the finished piece. But Lidia Fotieva said the sculpture was ‘quite good’.

  51

  Revolution – Again

  ‘We are making economic concessions now, in order to avoid having to make political ones.’

  Nikolai Bukharin, 14 April 1922

  ‘Lenin repudiated what he had slaughtered so many for not believing. They were right, it seemed, all along. They were unlucky in that he did not find it out before.’

  Winston Churchill (1874–1965)

  For a fanatical ideologue who dedicated most of his life to one set of socialist goals, Lenin possessed a remarkably pragmatic ability to bend with the wind. After the Kronstadt rebellion and the peasants’ revolts he changed policy 180 degrees and abandoned most of the economic measures he had introduced since the coup. Factories had stopped producing, money was worthless, there was mass starvation, Russia was exporting nothing. He admitted that ‘War Communism’, as he called it, had not worked and big changes were needed – revolutionary changes, though of course he would never have considered using such a term.

  He ditched the major economic experiments of the previous three years: the ban on private manufacturing, wholesale nationalisation, the seizure of peasant ‘surpluses’, the replacement of private trade with barter and the partial attempt to abolish money. Lenin now planned a ‘tactical retreat’ that would become known as the New Economic Policy. The requisitioning of grain was to be replaced by a ‘tax in kind’, and soon by a relatively straightforward money tax. Peasants would be allowed to dispose of any surpluses as they wanted to, implying a return to the private trade of farm produce on the open market. The ‘commanding heights’ of the economy would remain in State hands – banking, foreign trade, large-scale industry. But the remaining small enterprises could be leased to the State and run as co-operatives. People were allowed to employ labour once again, which had been banned since 1918. Money made a return and wages were paid in cash, not in kind as had been the custom in many enterprises for the past few years. Public services and utilities would no longer be free – even investment by ‘foreign capitalists’ was to be encouraged. The biggest concession of all was to the peasants, to try to keep them relatively content – or at least keep them from open rebellion. That was the main point of the NEP. ‘We are making economic concessions now, in order to avoid having to make political ones,’ as Bukharin, one of the brains behind the new policy, admitted.1

  At first Lenin faced uproar within the Communist Party; thousands of people tore up their Party cards. To the idealist true believers – and there were still some left – the NEP sounded like a return to capitalism and an acknowledgement that all their efforts since October 1917 had been in vain. To the careerists – of which there were many more – it was a massive risk which they believed would not work and would reduce their direct authority over people’s lives. For Lenin it was all about staying in power. He was prepared to give some economic handouts for political survival. He forced the NEP through an unwilling Party – his last big campaigning effort.

  He admitted it was a retreat, ‘but the whole army has to make this retreat, united’, he told the Party Central Committee in summer 1921. ‘Let us make things clear. The peasants are dissatisfied with their present relationship to the State – so it cannot continue…we are sufficient realists to say straight out “Let us revise our policy.” We must give the smallholder some stimulus, a push.’

  He admitted that introducing this element of ‘State capitalism’ – his words – was political rather than economic. ‘I appeal to…[the Party] that if they don’t want the Russian masses to do to them what they did to the Tsar’s people, they must throw overboard impracticable daydreams and they must be prepared to face economic laws.’2

  The NEP stimulated the economy quickly, but it distorted the socialist experiment. In the cities, a new kind of ‘Soviet entrepreneur’ emerged, extremely rich and brash and showy, but loyal to the Communist Party, nicknamed NEP men. On the land farmers were producing again and were – for now – less fearful that their stock would be seized by the government.

  In Moscow everything was available again, for a price. ‘Shops and stores sprang up overnight, mysteriously stocked with delicacies Russians had not seen for years,’ recalled Emma Goldman, who had spent two decades in the US. ‘Large quantities of butter, cheese and meat were displayed for sale; pastry, rare fruit and sweets of every variety were to be purchased. Men, women and children with pinched faces and hungry eyes stood about gazing into the windows and discussing the great miracle: what was but yesterday considered a heinous offence was now flaunted before them in an open and legal manner.’

  When Lenin was asked how long the ‘tactical retreat’ would last he would say, ‘For a while, I think…probably not less than ten years.’ From now, in the time left to him, when Lenin talked about the economy he would urge modernisation and industrialisation as quickly as possible, and if that meant elements of capitalism, so be it. His new definition of Communism would be ‘Soviet power, plus electrification’.

  And he would slam bureaucracy, which had grown exponentially under Communism. No matter that he had created most of it. In his Soviet system each government job, from low- to mid-level upwards, would have a Party shadow, so the number of officials doubled. In the Soviet Union this remained more or less intact until the 1980s. Lenin saw the problem: ‘We should all be hanged for creating all this unnecessary red tape,’ he told Alexander Tsyurupa on 21 February 1922. ‘Everything around us is drowned in a filthy swamp of bureaucracy. Over-administration – madness. All these decrees: lunacy. Search for the right people, ensure that the work is properly done – that’s all that’s necessary.’

  He saw that this hydra head of bureaucracy was run by people who on the whole were not up to the job. ‘All the evils and hardships we are suffering from…are due to the fact that the Communist Party consists of ten per cent of convinced idealists, ready to die for the cause, but incapable of living for it, and ninety per cent of unscrupulous time-servers who have simply joined the Party to get jobs.’ Many of the leftist critics of the Soviet state over the following decades said pretty much the same thing.3

  —

  While he was freeing the economy, Lenin made it plain he would allow no political reforms. If he was going to force the NEP through an unwilling Party there had to be discipline, order and restraints – Leninist principles from the time of What Is to Be Done? in 1902 onwards. ‘We cannot have arguments about deviations and disagreements…we must put a stop to that,’ he told Bukharin. He wrote a resolution On Party Unity, kept secret for many years. It banned all independent factions and groupings in the Communist Party which the Kremlin magnates did not recognise, on pain of immediate expulsion from the Party, with no appeal. ‘No faction of any sort will be tolerated,’ it said. This was to have the gravest consequences for millions of loyal Communists over the coming decades. It was the principal weapon that Stalin would use against ‘deviationists’ or anyone he perceived to be an opponent.

  —

  After the Reds won the Civil War there began a thaw in the Cold War between Russia and the West.*1 The Allied nations said they would end the trade blockade if Russia agreed to pay her pre-1914 debts – an important issue for Britain, especially, which was owed nearly £600 million. Lenin, reluctantly, agreed, though he continued to complain privately that he didn’t see ‘why a nation should be obliged to pay for the chains it has worn for ages’. He prevaricated for a long time before a deal about the loan repayments was approved. The blockade was lifted in the winter of 1920. ‘We have failed to restore Russia to sanity by force. I believe we can save her by trade. Commerce has a sobering influence in its operations,’ Lloyd George said.*2

  Lenin hoped that it would mean a boom in trade and he tried to attract American and British companies to invest in Russia. He wrote letters to some of the companies which used to do business there before the
Revolution, imploring them to return. But few responded. He offered what he thought would be generous ‘concessions’ on access for exploring and developing Siberia’s immense natural resources. It didn’t quite turn out that way. He began talks with Singer, Westinghouse and General Electric, none of whom would invest in any significant way. He wooed millionaires like the oil magnate Armand Hammer, one of the few who took the bait. He became a Soviet apologist for the rest of his long life. Dealing with the Soviet regime in the early years was a risky business: assets could again be seized overnight in an unstable environment. Profits were uncertain. But the principal reason was that however much Lenin wanted foreign trade and needed foreign capital, he would never enter into any agreement that might weaken the regime’s grip on economic life in Russia.

  *1 British Labour politican and peace activist Ethel Snowden, on a Party delegation visit to Moscow in 1920, told Lenin that he must do something about the Allied economic blockade: ‘there has to be an end to the Iron Curtain between Russia and the West’, she said. This was the earliest use of the phrase Iron Curtain in reference to the Soviets.

  *2 Lloyd George loathed Communism but had a high opinion of Lenin. In private he called Lenin ‘the biggest man in politics’, according to his crony Lord (George) Riddell, the newspaper proprietor. A year before the NEP was launched, Lloyd George prophesied that Lenin ‘was a big enough man to confess the truth and face it when his big experiment of Communism failed…he will change his plans and govern Russia by other methods’.

  52

  The Last Battle

  ‘If one cannot work for the Party any longer one must be able to look the truth in the face and die…’

  Lenin to Nadya, 8 December 1911

  For a month, Lenin seemed to be recovering well from the operation to remove the bullet from his neck. He was sleeping relatively soundly, for him, and he wasn’t complaining of headaches. But on the morning of 26 May 1922 he had a relapse. He fell as he was getting out of bed in the dacha at Gorki and he began to vomit violently. At 10 a.m. his sister Maria, in a highly agitated state, rang the physician he liked the most, Dr Vladimir Rozanov. ‘Doctor, I beg you, you must come at once.’ He arrived with Nikolai Semashko, the Health Commissar, Lenin’s brother Dmitry and a prominent Moscow general practitioner, Dr Leonid Levin. They could see straight away that he had suffered a serious stroke. He was paralysed along his right side and his speech was impeded.*1

  Lenin looked in great pain, according to Maria. He asked one of the doctors, ‘Is it paralysis? Tell me. If it is paralysis it might as well be the end.’ Rozanov tried to reassure him: ‘Vladimir Ilyich, you will be well again soon.’ But he replied, ‘This is the first alarm signal, for sure.’ He looked at Nadya and said, ‘This is the warning bell.’

  Over the next few days, teams of distinguished professors from Russia and abroad examined him and performed a series of tests – including for syphilis (which came back negative, though doctors had already given him the standard prophylactic treatment at that time of a mild arsenic dose).*2

  The doctors insisted to Lenin’s family, and to the Kremlin magnates, that he had retained his mental powers, though the claim seemed to contain a logical inconsistency. Neuropathologist Professor Kramer noted that ‘he is unable to perform the simplest arithmetical functions, and he has lost the ability to recall even a few short phrases, while retaining his intellect in full’. A depressing diagnosis.

  Lenin’s sister Maria recalled that three days after the stroke, doctors asked him to multiply twelve by seven. ‘He could not do it and he was very depressed. But then his old stubbornness reasserted itself. When the doctors had gone, he struggled for three hours over the problem and solved it by addition instead (12+12=24, 24+12=36) and so on.’ Painstakingly, Nadya was teaching him how to write. For a few weeks he was filling pages of paper with illegible scrawls. In a depressed state, the idea of ending his life took hold of Lenin.1

  In 1911 he had spoken at the funeral in Paris of Paul Lafargue and his wife, Laura. His powerful eulogy had been translated into French for him by Inessa. When Lafargue approached seventy he decided that his social usefulness was over, he could no longer contribute anything significant to the Cause, and he made a suicide pact with his wife. After the ceremony Lenin told Nadya how much he approved. ‘If one cannot work for the Party any longer one must be able to look the truth in the face and die like the Lafargues.’

  According to Maria, Lenin asked Nadya to get him some poison. She tried to give him cyanide, but couldn’t go through with it. It was Lenin who suggested asking Stalin, and his wife agreed. ‘He is a firm and steady man devoid of sentimentality,’ said Maria. Three days after his stroke, on the day he failed the doctors’ arithmetic test, Lenin ‘determined that it was all over for him…he asked us to send for Stalin’, said Maria.

  Stalin arrived at Gorki the following morning, 30 May. The two of them were left alone for just over five minutes and it is not known exactly what was said. Stalin definitely promised Lenin that he would carry out his wish ‘if it becomes necessary’. But according to Maria and Bukharin, who was also at Gorki at the time, Stalin seemed to be ‘sceptical’ about the idea. Stalin reported back to the Kremlin that Lenin had asked for poison, but he was unwilling to give it personally – and the moment wasn’t right. He was told he had done absolutely the right thing. There would be a time when Stalin wanted Lenin dead. But not yet. It was too early for him to take full advantage.2

  —

  From the moment of his first stroke until the day he died the true state of Lenin’s health was a closely guarded secret. The public was systematically misinformed. His personal authority was considered by the comrades so crucial to the Bolshevik regime that anything that might have weakened it was considered a risk. Trotsky explained their thinking: ‘We asked ourselves with genuine alarm how those outside the Party would receive the news – they believed above all in Lenin.’

  On his sickbed, Lenin himself knew the lies being told. When, a week after the stroke, a bulletin was issued from the Kremlin saying he was suffering from a stomach ailment, he said: ‘I thought the best diplomats were at The Hague, but it seems they are in Moscow – they are the doctors who have composed the statements about my health.’ Throughout the summer newspapers were full of articles signed by Kamenev, Bukharin and Stalin about how Lenin was recuperating quickly, and in a slightly limited capacity was working as hard as ever before he returned to normal soon. There were no recent pictures of him, though.

  Lenin’s last great battle was with his doctors and the clique of Bolsheviks around him who he was convinced – rightly – were plotting to take over from him after his death. He was determined to keep control of the regime for as long as he possibly could.

  He recovered, slowly. His speech improved, and he could just about walk and move his right arm within a few weeks. He tried to return to work, but managed only two or three hours a day before he exhausted himself. He could not maintain concentration and his thoughts drifted off at tangents. Yet nominally he was still running the country. He had wanted to go to the Genoa Conference, the first big international meeting Soviet Russia was invited to attend, which he hoped would alter his regime’s pariah status. But he was too ill.

  As a sick man he was still issuing orders to Dzerzhinsky and the ‘organs’.*3 ‘On the question of banishing abroad the writers and professors who help the counter-revolution. This should be done more thoroughly,’ he wrote on 22 July, with a copy to Stalin. ‘A commission…should submit a list of several hundred…who must be deported abroad. We will purge Russia for a long time to come.’ Around the same time he was rewriting much of the new penal code, with the Justice Commissar Dmitry Kursky. It was his idea to make it a crime ‘not to recognise the right of the Communist system of ownership to replace capitalism and attempt its overthrow’. This became the basis for the notorious Article 58 of the Soviet Penal Code under which millions of people were killed, jailed or sent into the great maw of the Gulag over
the following decades.3

  But the other magnates were starting to sideline him and Lenin knew what was happening. Nobody understood power and how it operated better than he. Big decisions were taken at meetings without him; a ‘triumvirate’ was forming of Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev – without Trotsky – which gathered before official government and Party meetings to agree a line. He thought they would remove him before too long. He was sent papers, but often the important documents were at the bottom of the pile, which the officials thought he might not reach before he got too tired.

  Before the stroke he wrote important letters himself and he hated dictating to a secretary. Now, when he became overtired, he had little choice. ‘He used to say that he was accustomed to seeing what he had written in front of him and was finding dictation difficult,’ Fotieva said. ‘He disliked the sight of a stenographer sitting there with pencil poised waiting for him to go on while he took a few moments to think what he wanted to say next. He had to adjust himself to it, however, and thought it would help if the stenographer had a book to read in the pauses, but that was not much good either. In the end, the stenographer was placed in the adjoining room and given earphones so that Vladimir Ilyich could dictate to her over the phone.’

  By October he had rallied enough to make a few public appearances. The press and Kremlin officials talked him up, but he was a sad sight for those who had known him at all well. On 13 November, after a short speech to the Fourth Comintern Congress, he was drenched in sweat and admitted to Nadya afterwards, ‘I forgot what I had already said…and what I already had to say.’

  A week later, after a speech at the Bolshoi he received rapturous applause for several minutes, but his performance fooled few people. The French Communist Alfred Messmer, who had known Lenin since his days in Paris, said sadly: ‘Those who saw him for the first time might have said “this is the same old Lenin”. But for others no such illusion was possible. Instead of the alert Lenin they had known, the man before them now was badly affected by paralysis, his features remained frozen and his general appearance was that of an automaton. His habitually simple, rapid, confident speech was replaced by a hesitant, jerky delivery. Sometimes words eluded him.’4