Lenin: A Biography

by Robert John Service

  But Lenin himself was coming in for fierce criticism by lower party and governmental officials. They wanted a tighter hierarchy inside the Soviet state than currently existed, and accused Lenin of tardiness in imposing it. In short, they demanded that the central political leadership should properly centralise the state administration. Some insisted that this process should be accompanied by provisions for democratic accountability within both the party and the soviets. These critics became known as the Democratic Centralists and were led by N. Osinski and T. D. Sapronov. Another group of disgruntled local officials could not care less whether democratic accountability – even in the extremely limited form proposed by the Democratic Centralists – was secured. They simply wanted the state machinery to function reliably. Among such critics was Lazar Kaganovich. Osinski, Sapronov and Kaganovich went on carping at Lenin and Sverdlov from their different standpoints.

  These were not the only criticisms of policy. Trotski, with Lenin’s consent, had introduced Imperial Army officers into the Red Army. To each of them he attached a political commissar to keep watch over their loyalty; and for good measure he took hostages from their families who would pay with their lives for any acts of treachery. But Trotski did not stop at that. He shot political commissars, too, if they disobeyed orders. He lined up regiments of deserters and carried out the Roman punishment of decimation. He scorned the notion that long-standing Bolshevik party officials should have no special treatment in the Red Army. For many Bolsheviks in the armed forces, this was insufferable and they demanded military reform. Some of them even argued that Trotski, who had not been a Bolshevik before 1917, might emerge from the armed forces like Napoleon Bonaparte in the French Revolution and become dictator. Lenin tried to avoid the controversy for as long as possible. But inside the party a so-called Military Opposition – inspired behind the scenes by Stalin, Trotski’s bitter enemy – demanded the sacking of the former Imperial Army officers. Only when it came to a definitive choice between the continuation of the policy and Trotski’s resignation did Lenin agree to arbitrate; and by and large he backed Trotski rather than lose him as People’s Commissar of Military Affairs.

  Other changes of policy were made in that terrible winter. On 2 December the committees of the village poor were scrapped after it was found that they caused more harm than benefit to the party in the countryside. Peasants basically disliked the divisiveness introduced by the committees. Moreover, it frequently occurred that the committees harassed not just the richer households but the ‘middle peasantry’ that, as Lenin had repeatedly declared, the party wanted to keep on its side. The abolition of the committees was notable in a couple of ways. The first was that Lenin dropped the policy without acknowledging that the mistake in introducing it had been principally his own. He did not often admit to past error, and this occasion was no exception. Secondly, it was evident that the committees of the village poor, despite being unpopular with the peasantry, remained congenial to party officials. Lenin had to convince his party of the practical need to avoid alienating popular opinion by too rapid and coercive a movement in the direction of socialist measures. Not for the last time.

  The need for him to react speedily to situations was at a premium. Abroad the Great War drew abruptly to a close on the western front on 11 November when the Central Powers were compelled, after the failure of their massive summer offensive, to sue for an armistice. Britain, France, Italy and the USA had triumphed. Lenin’s instant reaction was to abrogate the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The eight months of the ‘obscene peace’ were at an end. Lenin could at last demonstrate to his critics in the party that he was genuinely committed to ‘European socialist Revolution’. Finance, political propaganda (including a German translation of The State and Revolution) and envoys were rushed from Moscow to Berlin. The assumption was that military defeat had brought about a revolutionary situation; neither Lenin nor the rest of the Central Committee were concerned about the potential response of the Western Allies. The priority had to be the promotion of a far-left socialist seizure of power in Germany. Such an achievement would, thought Lenin, make for a political ‘block’ between Russia and Germany that no army in the world could overthrow. The main problem was that no communist party yet existed in Germany. Instead Lenin would have to work through the Spartacus League headed by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, and with this in mind he initiated moves to convoke a founding meeting of a Communist International. The European revolutionary political offensive would require careful preparation.

  Yet the German government after Wilhelm II’s abdication was constituted by leaders of the German Social-Democratic Party who utterly disapproved not only of Lenin and the October Revolution but also of Liebknecht and Luxemburg. The Spartacus League had long ago abandoned hope in the German Social-Democratic Party. Liebknecht and Luxemburg went their own way and planned insurrection. Yet even this could not bring unconditional comfort to Lenin. For Liebknecht and Luxemburg were not exactly admirers of Lenin. In particular, Luxemburg had written criticising Leninist agrarian policy (too easy upon ‘petit-bourgeois’ peasants), national policy (too indulgent to the non-Russians) and policy on government (disgracefully anti-democratic). If the Spartacus League succeeded, then the Bolsheviks in Russia might well encounter problems both in the rest of Europe and in Russia. But if it failed, what would be left of the strategic prognosis of Bolshevism?

  Things turned out badly for the Spartacists. On 6 January 1919 they attempted to overturn the socialist government in Berlin. The Defence Minister Gustav Noske mobilised every available anti-communist unit, including troops recently demobilised from the western and eastern fronts. The Spartacus League was hopelessly outgunned. Liebknecht and Luxemburg were captured and butchered and their bodies were deposited outside the Zoological Gardens. This was a disaster for international communism, but Lenin lost no sleep over it. At least, he foresaw, there would be greater freedom than he had expected in the organisation of the Third International; and since he continued to assume that the German working class was culturally superior to Russian workers he had no doubt that a successful socialist revolution would anyway soon occur in Berlin. The practical snag was that communist parties did not exist outside Russia. Lenin would have to draw delegates from far-left organisations that had yet to align themselves with the policies of the October Revolution. He would also have to surmount the travel problems that many such delegates would encounter at a time when Soviet Russia had no diplomatic relations with the outside world.

  The end of the Great War also had consequences in Russia’s borderlands. Since the signature of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty a great western swathe of the former Russian Empire had lain outside the proclaimed sovereignty of Sovnarkom. The withdrawal of the German forces gave Lenin his opportunity to invade this region and set up organs of ‘Soviet power’. The Red Army, aided by local volunteers, made rapid progress; and, at Lenin’s insistence, it did not incorporate the region into the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic but established independent Soviet republics in Estonia, Lithuania and Belorussia, Latvia and Ukraine. The Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic would have ties with each of them on a bilateral and equal basis.

  The establishment of a growing number of independent Soviet republics was not welcomed by many leading Bolsheviks, especially those who had been brought up in the borderlands and who had been drawn towards Bolshevism precisely because of its commitment to eradicating nationalism. Independent Soviet republics appeared to them – and several of the most articulate among them were Jews who felt especially vulnerable to the anti-semitism of the region’s nationalists – as yet another dereliction of universal socialist values. Lenin, of course, was partly Jewish by ancestry. But he had not had a youth scarred by negative national discrimination. He had been brought up as a Russian European and had campaigned on this platform as a politician, and he hated any manifestations of what he called Great Russian chauvinism. His background enabled him to take a more detached standpoint on ‘the
national question’ than most of his colleagues. National and ethnic sensitivities in the borderlands, he insisted, had to be respected. His party was aghast at this; but he tried to explain that he was taking precautions against the independent Soviet republics being able to behave independently. The communist parties in the republics would be treated as mere regional organisations of the Russian communist party and its Central Committee. Real power would thus be held not in the ‘independent’ Soviet republics but in Moscow.

  Over the winter of 1918–19 the mood in the Bolshevik Central Committee was schizophrenic. Europe was again on the boil, and the possibility of a European socialist revolution was in the thoughts of all central party leaders. Yet to the east there was cause for intense worry. Kolchak was rampaging further towards Moscow from Perm. There might well soon be Soviet republics in Warsaw, Prague and Berlin. But would socialism survive in the cities of the October 1917 Revolution?

  As the First Congress of the Third International (Comintern) opened in the Kremlin precinct on 2 March 1919, Lenin stressed the imminence of Revolution in Europe. It was an unprepossessing gathering for an organisation that was aimed at changing the face of world politics. Out of thirty-four voting delegates, all but four were already resident in Russia. Lenin and his associates had picked people who came from other countries and then given them a mandate to speak on behalf of the entire far left. The French revolutionary grouping represented in Moscow anyway had only twelve members across all France. Lenin had got up to this sort of trick often enough before the Great War at Bolshevik meetings that he defined as meetings of the entire party. But the First Comintern Congress was even more brazenly organised under Bolshevik auspices. The German representative Hugo Eberlein protested against manipulation, but was cajoled into accepting a fait accompli; he was made to feel that otherwise he would spoil the general mood of enthusiasm. Lenin added to the embarrassment by reading out a letter purporting to come from the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies in the English Midlands. This was poppycock, and it is quite likely that Lenin knew it. But it had the necessary effect: the Comintern Congress applauded the magnificent ‘news’ and looked forward to the expansion of the socialist Revolution to the west of Russia.

  Once the pleasantries had been completed, the Bolshevik leadership stepped forward with a series of draft resolutions that confirmed their dominance of the proceedings. Lenin spoke on ‘bourgeois democracy and the dictatorship of the proletariat’. His argument was that the civic freedoms that existed in capitalist countries were enjoyed exclusively by the middle classes; and Lenin and succeeding Bolshevik speakers – Bukharin, Zinoviev, Osinski and Trotski reinforced the message that Kautskyite hopes of effecting a socialist transformation in Europe by largely parliamentary methods were doomed to failure. Not even Lenin pushed his luck too hard. He barely referred to Marx, Engels and Marxism, to communism, to civil war or to the role and internal organisation of the party. This omission was no coincidence. The Bolshevik leadership’s objective at the First Comintern Congress was to obtain consent to the founding of the new organisation and to secure control over it in the immediate future. Having got agreement to a generally anti-parliamentary strategy, Lenin and his fellow leaders would later be able to impose further details of ideology and tactics. The Comintern’s foundation may have been organisationally ramshackle, but the consequences for the world over the next couple of decades were immense. A body with pretensions to undermining global capitalism had been created, and every political trend to the right of communism learned to recognise the threat posed from Moscow.

  Quite how the threat would be realised was as yet unclear. Not even Lenin had accurate information or instincts about the current developments in world politics. Some of his prognoses were so awry that they were kept permanently out of the various editions of his collected speeches. A striking example is the funeral oration he delivered at the Volkovo Cemetery in Petrograd on 13 March 1919 after the death of his brother-in-law Mark Yelizarov:17

  France is preparing to hurl herself upon Italy, they haven’t shared the booty [from the Great War]. Japan is arming herself against America… The working masses of Paris, London and New York have translated the word ‘soviets’ into their own languages… We’ll soon see the birth of the World Federal Soviet Republic.

  Few things were more unlikely than a Franco-Italian war. Japan was distrustful of the USA, but hardly in belligerent mood. Nor in truth did French, British and American workers translate Russian vocabulary; instead they kept words like ‘soviets’ in their transliterated form as if wishing to emphasise the exotic nature of what they were reading about Russia in their newspapers. Lenin was not just trying to cheer his supporters. He was in a genuinely elevated mood, and let his imagination and ideology take over from cool judgement.

  He was brought down to earth in the same month at his own party’s Eighth Congress. There was hardly a policy that was not controversial among leading Bolsheviks. Lenin and the Central Committee were applauded for convoking the Comintern Congress, but for precious little else. The opening report was given by Lenin himself, who was greeted by shouts of ‘Long live Ilich!’ He gave no opening to any critic past or present. The Brest-Litovsk Treaty had been right. The establishment of the ‘committees of the village poor’ had been right (even though they had had to be abolished). The use of Imperial Army officers had been right. The creation of independent Soviet republics had been right. The Central Committee had done its bit and any faults were to be attributed to those who carried out the policies, not the policy-makers. If there were problems, they had not arisen in Moscow: ‘Organisational activity has never been a strong side of Russians in general and the Bolsheviks in particular, and in the meantime the main task of the proletarian revolution is precisely an organisational task.’ Lenin was attempting to throw back all the problems in the face of his critics. Either they failed, out of ignorance, to understand the wisdom of the policies or they fell short as implementers of the wise measures. The Central Committee could not be faulted.

  This was quite a claim. The Bolsheviks had traditionally been seen as the most ideological and most tightly organised of Russian political bodies. They had come into existence in 1903 precisely because of their rejection of amateurism in the organisational life of the party in the Russian Empire, and Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? had been their cardinal factional text. The reality had always been different: the Bolsheviks had usually been as chaotic and ill-disciplined as any other Russian political party until the last few months. Yes, Lenin was trying to obviate criticism of the Central Committee. But also he was blurting out what he genuinely felt in general terms. He adhered to an ethnic hierarchy in his revolutionary politics. For him, Germans were culturally superior to Britons and French, who in turn were superior to Finns; and, of course, Finns had a distinct edge over the Russians. Lenin was experiencing constant frustration from the country he now found himself in. It did not help that a civil war was raging; but he knew that, even without the fighting, he would find Russia a terrible place in which to make a revolution.

  Thus the young Lenin who wanted to turn Russia into a ‘European’, ‘Western’ country had not faded away. At the Comintern Congress he had played up the Russian theme: the Bolsheviks had started a socialist revolution and the other Europeans had to agree to model themselves on the Russians. At the Eighth Party Congress he chastised the Bolsheviks for being too Russian. The result was a wrangle: several of his critics were fellow leaders who had been his co-speakers at the Comintern Congress. Lenin in his turn was attacked by Osinski for running the party and government on the principles of an amateur; he was also accused by Bukharin of insufficient radicalism in drafting the Party Programme. On and on it went. The granting of state independence to Finland was described as a fiasco since Lenin’s expectation had been thwarted that a Finnish Soviet republic would result. By then Lenin was having such a hard time that he opted to let others defend Trotski on the matter of the Red Army’s organisation. Yet he could not en
tirely avoid debate, and when the discussion began in a secret Congress, Lenin not only defended Trotski but also chastised Stalin for the excessive military losses on the southern front. As party leader he would impose himself.

  On nearly every main policy he got his way. He had to compromise a little on the ‘military question’; he also had to find an equivocal set of words on the ‘national question’: his slogan of ‘the freedom of secession for nations in reality’ was too much for most delegates. But he got his way more successfully on the ‘agrarian question’. The Congress agreed that the middling sections of the peasantry should be indulged. Possibly it helped, too, that news of the outbreak of a Hungarian socialist revolution was delivered towards the end of the proceedings. Lenin rose to the occasion. Raising his fist, he strutted forward to the edge of the platform and – with all the force of his lungs – he assured the audience: