Lenin: A Biography

by Robert John Service

  ‘We are convinced that this will be the last heavy half-year.’ He noted that international imperialism had not yet been defeated. But he was unworried. ‘This wild beast’, he affirmed, ‘will perish and socialism will conquer throughout the world.’

  23. EXPANDING THE REVOLUTION

  April 1919 to April 1920

  In the year and a half after the October Revolution the Bolsheviks had laid the foundations for a unique state that lasted in Russia for seven decades and was the model for communist regimes covering a third of the inhabited world after the Second World War. There was a single ruling party. There was a politically subordinate legislature, executive and judiciary. The party in reality was the supreme state agency and Lenin in all but name was the supreme leader of that agency.

  Not everything was yet in place. The party had not thoroughly subordinated the other state agencies. In some respects it did not try to. Once the Politburo had fixed the personnel appointments and the strategy, the Red Army operated without interference; and the Cheka, which had been protected by Lenin since its creation, was criticised but never seriously punished for its frequent ‘excesses’. Thus the state was not as tightly co-ordinated as Leninist political doctrines demanded. Furthermore, there were several aspects of the later one-party state that had not been introduced. As yet there was no decision on the permanent constitutional interrelationship of the various Soviet republics. There was no comprehensive plan for dealing with the former upper social classes once the Civil War had been won. Nor had the party’s strategy been fixed for the creation of a new socialist culture, for conditions of work, remuneration and recreation and even for the long-term role of the party in the one-party state. Wide gaps existed in Leninist theory about dictatorship, democracy, social justice and human rights. Even though the general architecture of the state had already been established, much about the Soviet order had yet to be elaborated.

  It was unclear in spring 1919 that the building would stand much longer. The Whites were still confident that their cause would prevail in Russia and that they would soon drive the Reds from the Kremlin. This was not the only civil war at the time. There was another Russian civil war, waged on a local basis, between the Russian peasantry on one side and any army – whether Red or White – in the vicinity. In each borderland of the former Russian Empire there were also civil and ethnic wars. But Lenin was preoccupied by one of these wars: the war waged by his Red Army on three great, moving fronts against the White forces of Kolchak, Denikin and Yudenich. The Red commanders assumed that, if and when this war had been won, they would easily proceed to victory in the others; and the Politburo under Lenin added that such a victory would constitute only the preface to chapters of further revolutionary expansion in central and western Europe.

  But could they win the Civil War in Russia? Lenin’s prophecy in March 1919 that Bolsheviks would have only one ‘last heavy half-year’ was only a little over-optimistic. The military campaigns went in favour of the Reds. Admiral Kolchak’s advance into central Russia was held up in April, and Ufa in the southern Urals fell back into the Red Army’s hands in June. Lenin goaded his leading political commissars and generals relentlessly. Always he demanded greater effort and ruthlessness. He predicted doom unless instant success could be obtained. To the Revolutionary-Military Soviet preparing an offensive against Kolchak from its temporary base in Lenin’s native town Simbirsk, he telegraphed: ‘If we don’t conquer the Urals before the winter, I consider the death of the Revolution inevitable. Concentrate all the forces.’1 From a strategic standpoint this was nonsense: there was no conclusive reason to believe that Kolchak had to be defeated by late autumn. But Lenin wanted to incite his subordinates. He so much liked the phrase about the death of the Revolution that he used it in another telegram on the same day to leading commissars on an entirely different front, in Kiev over five hundred miles to the south-west of Moscow.2

  The city of Perm, where the Reds had been ignominiously defeated in December 1918, was retrieved in July 1919, and Kolchak fled into mid-Siberia, never to return. Kolchak’s primacy among the White commanders had been recognised by Anton Denikin in southern Russia. Denikin was ready to begin his own assault on the Red heartland in July 1919. He did this by splitting his forces. One wing was sent across the Don Basin, the other northwards up the river Volga. Denikin’s strategy was uncomplicated. He issued a Moscow Directive to move in a straight line as fast as possible towards the capital. The recent defeat of Kolchak freed the Reds to strengthen their defence. In summer 1919 they drove Denikin back into Ukraine. The news was greeted with huge acclaim in the Kremlin. Until the battles in northern Russia there had been a distinct possibility that Denikin would succeed where Kolchak had failed. But Lenin’s delight was given no public display. The Bolshevik Central Committee and Sovnarkom held no celebration. He devoted no speech or article to the event. War was not like Marxist theory or economic policy. War was something to be won, but not theorised – and perhaps theorising anyway would have made winning less likely.

  Winning, for Lenin, was everything. After his recovery from the August 1918 assassination attempt, his personal assistant Bonch-Bruevich persuaded him to have a short film made in the Kremlin precinct. The aim was to prove that he was still alive. It was not all that interesting a performance by Lenin and Bonch-Bruevich:

  The scene: Lenin and Bonch-Bruevich stand near a tree inside the Kremlin precinct.

  The paraphernalia: Lenin appears wearing his three-piece suit while Bonch-Bruevich, obviously a softy, appears in a raincoat.

  The action: Lenin and Bonch-Bruevich talk together, and Bonch puts him at his ease so that Lenin is seen offering a lively reaction to something said by Bonch.

  The conversation: The contents of the conversation are not known.

  The film had a negligible impact. Everyone who might have attended the cinema in the Civil War was scrabbling after food and fuel, and Russian cinemas were short of the equipment they needed to put the Sovnarkom Chairman on screen. Lenin anyway could not relax in front of the moving-action camera; the conversation with Bonch-Bruevich was nowhere near as gripping for an audience as films taken of Kerenski boarding trains and waving at crowds in 1917. Lenin had no such inhibition about photographs, to which he was more accustomed. After seizing power, he had initially forbidden these to be taken of him, a prohibition resulting not from shyness but from a pragmatic judgement about propaganda. In July 1917 he had had to shave off his beard, and only began to grow it again on 25 October 1917. Not till January 1918, when he again felt happy about the way he looked, did he allow an official photographer to get near him. Although he did this in the interests of publicising his party and its policies, he took no expert advice. The whole business of propaganda remained amateurish for several years and each party leader did things his own way.

  Nevertheless there was an appreciation of Lenin’s unique importance as party leader and increasingly he was singled out for special attention in Pravda. The campaign to erect a political cult of him began in earnest after the attempt on his life in August 1918. Zinoviev wrote a biography of him. Articles appeared in party and government newspapers. Posters were pasted up. No Bolshevik – apart from Trotski in the Red Army – was accorded such individual acclaim as Lenin.

  The image was of a selfless leader brought low by humanity’s enemies. The party’s writers described him as an authentic son of Russia and a fighter for material improvements, for enlightenment and for peace. Lenin appeared as a Soviet Christ: superhuman powers were attributed to him. His survival was ascribed to a miracle; the writers did not bother to explain how to reconcile this with their militant atheism. All manner of nastiness was attributed to his assassins. There was a story that the bullets had been tipped with a deadly poison used on the arrows of South American Indians. Another tale suggested that the Allies had been the instigators of the attack. Ludicrous as this was, the counter-propaganda of the anti-Red forces was no nearer to the truth. The posters and printed handout
s of the Whites were forerunners of German Nazism. In them, Lenin appeared as a demonic entity. Usually he was represented alongside Trotski as co-leader of an international Jewish conspiracy pernicious to both country and world civilisation. Strife, blood, vengeance: these were the inevitable results of Russia’s having fallen victim to Leninism.

  Of course, Lenin was indeed of part-Jewish ‘ethnic’ descent. He was also truly an internationalist. He really did initiate and aggravate mayhem in Russia and detested most forms of Russian patriotism. And yet the White notion that he was leading a Judaeo-Masonic crusade against Mother Russia was just as preposterous as the Red notion that he was the secular Christ of the Great Socialist Revolution. Whether demonised or sanctified, he was the object of political propaganda. But he did not mind. He took no heed of what the Whites said of him, and although he apparently felt distaste for adulatory remarks made about him in his presence, he was not unduly disconcerted by the Lenin cult in general and did not seek to terminate it.

  He must have calculated that the cult would help to consolidate the regime and his position within it. He understood the need to adapt his political message to his surroundings and knew that most Russians, being either peasants or people who had left the villages only recently, were not well informed about public life. The party’s message had to fit the lineaments of the country’s popular culture, as he explained to Maxim Gorki:3

  Well, in your opinion, millions of peasants with rifles in their hands: they’re a threat to culture, aren’t they? Do you really think that the Constituent Assembly would have been able to cope with [their] anarchism? You who make such a noise about the anarchism in the countryside ought to understand our work better than anyone. We’ve got to show the mass of Russians something very simple, very accessible to their way of reasoning. Soviets and communism are a simple thing.

  Gorki was rather shocked by the revelation that Lenin obviously had a deep suspicion of ordinary Russians. For Lenin, they were like promising children who had yet to go to school. He thought this not just about the party’s enemies – kulaks, priests, merchants, bankers and nobles – but about those whom the party supposedly cherished: the lower social classes.

  Although peasants incurred his special ire, even workers could irritate him by sticking to the traditions of the religious calendar. In advance of the summertime feast day of St Nicholas he exclaimed: ‘It’s stupid to be reconciled to the “Nikola” festival. We must get all the Chekas up on their feet and shoot people who don’t turn up for work because of the “Nikola” festival.’4 Lenin explained that similar preventive violence should be prepared for the festivals at Christmas and New Year. Some workers’ friend!

  He was at his angriest, needless to say, about the middle and upper classes. For example, he upbraided Zinoviev for trying to prevent Petrograd workers from rampaging around the city’s affluent districts. Another correspondent received the following telegram, and there is hardly anything like it as a justification of repression:5

  There can be no avoiding the arrest of the entire Kadet party and its near-Kadet supporters so as to pre-empt conspiracies. They’re capable – the whole bunch – of giving assistance to the conspirators. It’s criminal not to arrest them. It’s better for dozens and hundreds of intellectuals to serve days and weeks in prison than that 10,000 should take a beating. Eh, eh! Better!

  There was also an element of sheer pleasure in the terror he wanted to inflict:6

  It is devilishly important to finish off Yudenich (precisely to finish him off: give him a thorough beating). If the offensive [by him] has started, isn’t it possible to mobilise 20 thousand Petrograd workers plus 10 thousand bourgeois, place artillery behind them, shoot several hundred and achieve a real mass impact on Yudenich?

  This statement was so outrageous that it was kept secret until after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

  How on earth were his commanders meant to line up the contingent of victims as Yudenich’s troops bore down on them? Anyway the Red Army high command took the view that what mattered to Lenin were fast military victories and that the armed forces knew best how to obtain these. (Not that this was any excuse for his sadistic self-indulgence.) For a short while, in October 1919, there was panic in Petrograd when Yudenich marched from Estonia. Zinoviev’s nerves were shattered. Even Lenin, despite his suggestion on tactics, queried whether the city could be defended. Trotski enjoyed a rare moment of being able to press for a more confident attitude. The Revolution had to be defended and Petrograd saved. The old capital was the symbol of the Revolution. And so the defences were reinforced. The Red Army, albeit without being proceeded by a screen of middle-class prisoners, dispersed the forces of Yudenich; and as Denikin was simultaneously preparing to evacuate his army from Kiev, it was clear that the Civil War’s crucial battles were over. The Reds had conquered the Russian Empire’s core. Moscow, Petrograd and Kiev were run by Bolshevik administrations.

  Foreign military powers were stronger than the Reds, but faced internal obstacles to their armed intervention in Russia. Unrest among their socialist parties was a factor. Although Lenin was by no means popular except with groups on the far left, a reluctance prevailed among socialists to castigate the Bolsheviks unequivocally. The soldiers who had fought and won the Great War did not relish the prospect of fighting the Red Army. The victorious Allies – France, the United Kingdom, the USA and Italy – decided to end their economic blockade of Soviet Russia. Kiev, occupied by Denikin in summer 1919, was taken again by the Reds in December. Where Soviet republics had been established in the winter of 1918–19, they began again to be installed. Lenin searched Europe for a sign that ‘socialist Revolution’ might be expanded westwards. He thought of northern Italy. He looked at the Czech lands, hoped that these might be a bridge across which the Red Army might march into Germany. Temporarily he had to give up hope for Hungary since Béla Kun’s communist state in Budapest had been overrun by counter-revolutionaries in August 1919. But still he wanted to launch a ‘revolutionary war’. He could not imagine that his Soviet republic would survive unless a fraternal socialist party elsewhere seized power and overturned capitalism. Revolution had to be consolidated in Russia and initiated in Europe – the two processes would reinforce each other.

  Already Lenin was considering how his party and government might promote post-war reconstruction. Since the October Revolution, and especially since mid-1918, the movement of policy had been unilinear. Less room was left for other parties in which to operate. The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries were hunted. The Socialist-Revolutionaries who had set up the Komuch administration were treated as counter-revolutionaries even though individual members were allowed to join civilian bodies as well as the Red armed forces. The Mensheviks kept a few newspapers going, but were frequently harassed and none of their leaders could count on remaining free. Sovnarkom was running a one-party state in all but name. It operated a virtual monopoly over what could be printed. It declared the fundamental correctness of Marxism. It had formally nationalised the industrial, transport and banking sectors of the economy and introduced massive legal restrictions on private activity in commerce and agriculture. It was starting to offer national and ethnic autonomy to the non-Russians it ruled over, but was intent upon maintaining the old multinational state of the Romanovs intact whatever the opinions of the populace. Such an outcome pleased Lenin. Even when he had not done the drafting, he agreed with the plans.

  But how on earth could a case be made for the communist economics of wartime? In fact Lenin, Sovnarkom’s principal theorist, made no attempt at a fundamental defence. In trying to explain his policies in the Civil War, some writers have postulated that he was pushed towards them solely by the unexpected and unpredictable circumstances after October 1917.7 The more traditional Western idea is that they were always his intended policies but had been kept secret until he had power. The likelihood is that neither is true. He had often been warned by the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries about the circumstances tha
t would result from a seizure of power by his party. He chose to ignore the predictions. But in doing so, he operated not so much on the basis of a secret grand plan as upon his general assumptions about Revolution. This enabled him to formulate policies as the situation changed with immense rapidity. When he hugely increased state economic ownership even beyond his specifications before October 1917, he could draw upon a range of operational assumptions. He approved of centralism, governmental control, coercion and class struggle; he hated private profit and longed to crush the social groups which benefited from it. And having witnessed the increase in state powers in the capitalist countries in the Great War, he assumed that the socialist dictatorship should aim at an even greater increase in Russia.

  Thus he spoke of the iniquity of kulaks (killing was too good for them) and factory owners and bankers (why shouldn’t they lose their factories and banks to the state?). He argued for the eradication of envy, greed and theft. He argued for a fully socialist economy to be established; and he implied that the current policies would put industry, agriculture, transport and commerce back on their feet. As time went on, moreover, he found the policies more and more congenial. He hoped to prolong them after the Civil War was over.

  In this he was a typical Bolshevik of the time. A consensus had been reached about how best to run the party and the state, to transform society and spread the Revolution abroad. Of course, several factions, groupings and individuals breached this consensus. The Democratic Centralists continued to demand that the lower party bodies should be enabled to influence the Central Committee and, increasingly, that the soviets should obtain a degree of autonomy from the party. Another faction, the Workers’ Opposition, went much further. Led by Alexander Shlyapnikov and Alexandra Kollontai, the critics attacked Lenin for failing to abide by his own precepts of 1917. They wanted workers and peasants to exercise greater authority over economic and social life. They called for trade unions and soviets as well as the party to be engaged in politics, and urged a democratisation of political structures. This was an awful affront to Lenin’s Bolshevism as it had developed after the October Revolution. He dealt with it ruthlessly. The factionalists found themselves asked by the Secretariat of the Central Committee to move to jobs outside the main industrial cities of Russia. Democratic Centralist leaders were sent in disproportionate numbers to Ukraine, where they would be unable to unsettle policies in the party as a whole.