Lenin: A Biography

by Robert John Service

  There were divergences among the Central Committee members themselves. The trouble came from the factions of the Democratic Centralists and Workers’ Opposition. But there were other less predictable spats. Kamenev and Bukharin complained about the arbitrariness of conduct allowed to the Cheka by Lenin. But by and large Lenin prevented reform; the Cheka proceeded with its Red Terror unimpeded by the need to hand over its victims to the People’s Commissariat of Justice.

  Neither Kamenev nor Bukharin believed strongly enough in procedures of jurisprudence to take their arguments further, and Lenin offered Bukharin a small concession: he was given the function of liaising with Dzierżyński, the Cheka Chairman, on the Central Committee’s behalf. But in another dispute in the Central Committee there was, in Lenin’s opinion, no room for compromise. In this instance his adversary was none other than Trotski, whose tour of the military front in the Urals had convinced him that the party’s economic policy had to be changed. In February 1920 Trotski called for a partial repeal of the grain-requisitioning measures. His reasoning was that the campaigns of expropriation by the state created a vicious circle of hoarding by peasants, state violence, reduction of the sown area and peasant rebellions. Instead he proposed that in certain agricultural regions there should be a restriction on the amount of seizable grain. Peasant households, Trotski declared, should be allowed to trade their grain surplus. The circle had to be broken if there was to be an end to the famine, ruin and chaos in the country.

  This proposal was phrased in pragmatic terms. Trotski was no more moved to moral indignation on the peasants’ behalf than was any other Bolshevik leader. He was exercised by the threat of agrarian dissolution. Usually Lenin was alive to the need to adjust policy for practical reasons. But not on this occasion. In 1918–19, reacting to the emergency in food supplies, he favoured state monopolies in official economic policy. Throughout the Civil War he claimed that there was no genuine scarcity of grain. Kulak hoarders, he claimed, were the beginning and end of the problem. For this reason he rejected Trotski’s diagnosis. It was a heated meeting of the Central Committee, and Lenin and Trotski criticised each other ferociously. Lenin got so worked up that he accused Trotski of supporting ‘Free Trade’.8 Since this was a policy of nineteenth-century British capitalists, the charge was wounding to Trotski, who did not like being compared to Richard Cobden, Robert Peel and John Bright. Lenin’s words were indeed unjustified, for Trotski was not proposing unrestricted or permanent agrarian reform; he did not even want it to be applied to the whole country. But Lenin was pretty sure of a majority, and triumphed by eleven votes to four.

  Usually when Lenin argued in the Central Committee, he kept control of himself. His anger on this occasion may have stemmed from resentment at Trotski’s attempt to prescribe economic policy from his post as People’s Commissar of Military Affairs. Lenin had become accustomed to dominating the civilian agenda. But also he was sure that the party, once it had ascended the summit of state economic ownership, should not climb down. He was in fiery, confident mood. Trotski was not going to be permitted to disturb him or unsettle his policies.

  Even Lenin, whose ability to take pragmatic decisions in order to save his party from disaster was legendary, had his own lapses when ideology occluded his vision. Trotski had the advantage of being able to observe provincial Russia on his trips to the war fronts. By contrast Lenin’s experience of the country after the October Revolution was restricted to Moscow, Petrograd and a handful of villages outside Moscow – and he also depended on the letters he received and the oral reports made to him in the Kremlin. But this will not do as an explanation of Lenin’s foolishness in rejecting Trotski’s proposal. Lenin had greater knowledge of Russia’s situation than is usually suspected. Daily he walked in the streets around the Kremlin; when his bodyguards complained about his casual attitude, he chastised them for denying the civil rights of each Soviet citizen to the Chairman of Sovnarkom.9 The streets of the capital were not very different from streets elsewhere. Lenin had frequently observed the beggars, the poor and the hungry. He saw the chaos and disorder. Lenin himself had been shot at. He had been robbed by bandits. He could not even depend on the honesty of the bodyguards assigned to him: on one unforgettable occasion he briefly left his jacket behind in his office and returned to discover that one of his bodyguards had filched his Browning revolver.10

  It was a fine dictatorship when the supreme leader was treated contemptuously by his underlings! Lenin had to explode with anger before the revolver was given back. There was a long way to be travelled before most ordinary workers and peasants would learn Marxist tenets and start to act like disciplined socialists. In the Kremlin itself a woman cleaner told Lenin to his face that she did not mind who was in power so long as she got paid.11 But Nadezhda Konstantinovna had a still more dispiriting tale to tell him. A female worker in the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment informed her that she was not going to work that day for no other reason than that workers were the masters now and she personally did not want to work.12 Then there was the time when Lenin and Nadezhda Konstantinovna were crossing a bridge in Moscow. The bridge was in poor repair, and a peasant passer-by remarked that it was a ‘Soviet-style [sovetskii] bridge, if you’ll pardon the expression’.13 Soon Lenin started using ‘Soviet-style’ as a pejorative epithet.14 The lack of conscientiousness in institutions and in daily life annoyed him intensely, and it was a mass phenomenon that he had not predicted before the October Revolution.

  His general attitude was not to the liking of Nadezhda Konstantinovna, who was appalled by his refusal to criticise workers for thieving wood from the structure of a state-owned house: ‘You, Vladimir Ilich, think in terms of broad plans. These little matters don’t get to you.’ She used the polite Russian form of ‘you’ – and it is probable that this verbal formality was meant to signal her anger at his complacency.

  But Lenin would not yield and reminded her that the workers needed wood for fuel: cold, ignorant men and women were not to be blamed. If workers froze, they would die. But Nadezhda Konstantinovna had had a glimpse of a deeper malaise than he would ever acknowledge. Indeed he had persistently aroused the working class into taking crude, violent action. When fellow Central Committee member Zinoviev tried to restrain attacks on middle-class people in Petrograd, Lenin was incandescent. From Moscow he dispatched a telegram threatening all manner of unpleasantness unless the mayhem were given political sanction again. Lenin the class warrior had an intuition that he needed to keep on supporting the mass expression of social revenge, and he sensed that he needed to maintain the pressure in the Civil War. No class enemy, he suggested, should be allowed to feel safe under Soviet rule. The Cheka by itself could not do everything. Workers, too, had to be let loose. The problem was that he had no plan for staunching the flow of their angry bitterness if ever the Russian Communist Party and the Red Army were to emerge victorious over the Whites.

  Lenin assumed that the best way to handle the workers was to keep them under tight control. He thought the same about soldiers, sailors and peasants. According to him, the crucial objective in internal social policy was to secure the prerequisites of economic reconstruction. For this purpose he was willing to postpone the immediate satisfaction of the consumer needs of society. The state’s priority, he declared, was to raise productivity in town and countryside.15 Hunger, disease and homelessness would continue for some time before Sovnarkom would tackle them. First and foremost for Lenin was the need to augment output in agriculture and industry. He was acting entirely within character. As a young man in the 1890s he had looked away when the other revolutionaries, including his elder sister Anna, had drawn attention to the plight of starving Volga peasants. At that time he had argued that the greater good was served by the peasantry’s impoverishment, namely Russia’s industrial development. Now in 1920 he sought macro-economic reconstruction before attempting to feed, cure and shelter the mass of society. And no one in the central party leadership felt differently.


  And yet on particular matters he would yield. When, for example, Kollontai approached him with some story of abuse, he would often grant her demand. Then, meeting her at some official assembly, he would enquire: ‘Now what? Are you satisfied? Now that we’ve done such and such.’ Kollontai was not easily quietened. As often as not she would reply along the following lines: ‘Yes, but things are bad for us in that area over there. We’ve let things slip there.’16

  It was in this spirit that he supported another of Trotski’s proposals. In January 1920 there seemed to be a serious possibility that military campaigns were about to come to an end. The Reds had beaten the Whites in Russia, and the last White Army – led after Denikin’s resignation in April 1920 by General Vrangel – was organising a last-ditch stand in Crimea. The Red Army’s task in reconquering the other non-Russian regions was not regarded as likely to present undue difficulties. The sole imponderable factor was the international situation. But, so long as the great powers did not intervene, the Politburo could expect to reconstitute the Russian Empire in its preferred socialist form within a short time.

  As discussions about military demobilisation were started, Trotski made an unusual suggestion. This was that Red Army conscripts should be transferred into ‘labour armies’ and deployed in the service of economic reconstruction. Under army discipline, they would be more effective than the existing urban workforce in restoring roads, buildings, mines and industrial enterprises to operational efficiency. When Trotski spoke, he gave the impression that the ‘militarisation of labour’ might even become a long-term phenomenon. Lenin endorsed the suggestion. But he did so in more cautious terms, and he took care about his public image. Labour armies were going to be unpopular with the conscripts and their families. They would also be unpopular with existing urban workers, who would perceive that official labour policy was becoming very authoritarian. While agreeing with Trotski that the labour armies would at least help in the short term with vital economic tasks, he took care that his speech on the subject to the Moscow province Party Conference was reported only very sketchily in Pravda. He was aware that both he and his regime were suspect in the eyes of the working class, the conscripts and the peasantry without unnecessarily antagonising them with the disciplinary rhetoric used by Trotski.

  Lenin was an ideologue, but he was also a sinuous politician in pursuit of his ideological goals. His handling of the ‘national question’ is a case in point. As Denikin was driven out of Ukraine, Lenin insisted that the Ukrainian Soviet Republic should be re-established. He knew that the Bolsheviks had frail support there. The peasantry hated Reds and Whites equally, and few ethnic Ukrainians had joined the Bolshevik faction before 1917. In order to govern Ukraine it was crucial, as Lenin discerned, to attract political groups that had once been hostile to the Bolsheviks. For this purpose he persuaded the central party leadership to sanction the incorporation of the Borotbists in the Communist Party. This was an extraordinary step. The Borotbists were Socialist-Revolutionaries, and in Russia the Socialist-Revolutionaries were being persecuted by the Bolsheviks. But Lenin did not mind being inconsistent. The Borotbists were mainly ethnic Ukrainians; they were also socialists. They would be able to provide a contingent of Soviet administrators congenial to Ukrainians. Simultaneously Lenin ensured that Jews, who were highly uncongenial to Ukrainian peasants, should be prevented from filling administrative posts in any great number. Ukrainian sensitivities were not to be offended.

  Lenin put things as follows to Kamenev: ‘Let us, the Great Russians, display caution, patience, etc., and gradually we’ll get back into our hands all these Ukrainians, Latvians…’17 Thus he wanted to enable the Bolsheviks to continue to pretend that the Ukrainian Soviet Republic was truly independent of Russia and that the bilateral treaty was founded upon equality between the two states. In reality Ukraine’s government would remain strictly under the control of the Russian Communist Party and its central party bodies in Moscow, and the Ukrainian Communist Party would operate as a subordinate and regional party organisation.

  These were clever, ruthless politics and Lenin was pleased with the result. He had not been so clever in his reaction to Trotski’s proposal for a reduction in the amount of grain requisitioning, but as yet he did not have to pay the price for his obstinacy. What appeared important to Lenin was that the Reds had survived and triumphed in the Civil War. Their institutions, practices and attitudes had been elaborated in the heat of the military conflict and he assumed that they could be used to win the peace. He was a happy man, and enjoyed himself in the spare moments he had for relaxation. Such moments were very few. The burden of office was immense. Lenin remained at the fulcrum of political business. He chaired the Politburo and the Central Committee. He chaired Sovnarkom. He chaired the Council of Labour and Defence. He kept a watch over the Orgburo and the Secretariat. He was living the Revolution in the most intense way. He was fulfilled. There was no physical threat to the regime that he felt his party, his government and its armed forces could not handle – and the Communist International was building communist parties elsewhere in Europe. The cause to which he had devoted his adult life was being advanced with success.

  Just one part of his life was less successful than it might have been. This was the personal corner. His health was no better and the headaches, the insomnia and the heart attacks continued to give him problems. He tried to ignore all this and to get on with his work. But his family was not giving him the support to which he was accustomed. Anna Ilinichna was distracted by grief for her husband Mark Yelizarov, who had died in March 1919. Maria Ilinichna was hard at work as Pravda’s ‘responsible secretary’. Nadezhda Konstantinovna, who had her own room in the Kremlin flat,18 went on a trip to the Volga region for a couple of months from July. Dmitri Ilich arrived from the Crimea just after Nadezhda Konstantinovna’s departure. The brothers had not seen each other for a decade, and went off swimming together in Pakhra Lake near Podolsk. There was a nostalgic aspect to this: in 1897 the Ulyanov family had rented a house in the vicinity while Lenin was in Siberian exile. In 1919, he showed off to Dmitri by refusing to use a towel.19 It was as if they were lads again by the river Sviyaga in Simbirsk. Lenin also relaxed by playing skittles with Nikolai Bukharin even though he habitually lost;20 and he enjoyed riding around Moscow with Anna Ilinichna’s adoptive son Gora Lozgachëv.

  But these interludes did not change the basic situation: Lenin was not feeling in the best of sorts either physically or emotionally. And it served him right. Nadya’s trip down the river Volga on the paddle steamer Red Star meant her running the risk of either typhoid or capture by anti-Bolshevik armies or bandits. It would not be a holiday, not by any stretch of the imagination. (Alexandra Kollontai, an adventurous person, had taken the same journey in the previous year and was in no doubt that she had taken an immense risk.)21 Nadya’s purpose was to give speeches to workers and peasants at each port on the way. She could not have given clearer indication that she wanted to get away from Moscow, from the Kremlin and from Lenin. The marriage was almost certainly entering one of its less happy phases. Lenin’s attitude to Inessa Armand was quite possibly among the causes of the malaise. When a terrorist explosion occurred in the Moscow city party headquarters it was Inessa who ran to alert Lenin in person in the Kremlin.22 Inessa remained devoted to him. Perhaps he responded in kind; perhaps not. Yet there may well have been sufficient brusqueness in his attitude to Nadezhda Konstantinovna that she thought she had nothing to lose by leaving for the Volga.

  Possibly, too, she thought that he might appreciate her more if she was away from him. If this was her purpose, it was successful. He wrote frequently and affectionately to her and these messages are the only ones that Nadezhda Konstantinovna kept from their long partnership. A few phrases exemplify the tone:23

  Dear Nadyushka,

  I was very glad to get news from you. I’ve already sent a telegram to Kazan and, not having a reply to it, sent another to Nizhni [Novgorod], and there was a reply from there tod
ay… I give you a big hug and ask you to write and telegraph more often.

  Yours [Tvoi],

  V. Ulyanov

  NB: Listen to the doctor: eat and sleep more, then you’ll be completely fit for work by the winter.

  Local party officials kept him informed about her progress.24 The news was not good: she was bothered by the heat and mosquitoes and was careless about her recuperation. Out of Lenin’s sight, she was not going to be told how to behave.

  Their personal relationship in any case was not the main thing in their lives and never had been. They lived for the Revolution; and when Lenin laid emphasis on her returning to fitness for work, he was expressing a priority that they shared. Both of them were feeling optimistic in general political terms. Yet it would have done Lenin good to join his wife on the Red Star steamship and witness the devastation alongside the river Volga. Moscow, despite its shabbiness, was untouched by military action. This helps to explain why Lenin in the winter of 1918–19 remained so full of confidence. In fact he and his party were facing a number of problems in the time ahead. Power at home was not as secure as he thought. The economy was a shambles. Rebellions by peasants and soldiers were in prospect. Workers’ strikes were already taking place. The spread of the Revolution westwards would not be simple even if an opportunity arose. In April 1920 Lenin agreed to attend a Bolshevik party celebration of his fiftieth birthday. Eulogies were delivered, and he made his embarrassment plain. But obviously he was pleased that the birthday was attended by such joy on the part of his close colleagues. He was about to discover that the general situation of his regime was worse than his eulogists – or indeed he himself – imagined.