Even on his birthday on 23 April 1921 (according to the new calendar) he had to, or felt he had to, adhere to a punishing schedule of duties. Thus he chaired a crucial Politburo meeting, among whose items for decision were education, Siberia, Ukrainian military dispositions, the Kronstadt mutiny’s aftermath and the Workers’ Opposition.6 Despite this long meeting, Lenin’s day was not over. He appointed a new personal aide for himself in Sovnarkom. He wrote to the People’s Commissariats for External Affairs and for Internal Affairs. He intervened in the plans drawn up for G. L. Shklovski’s medical treatment; this was almost a hobby of Lenin’s in relation to leading comrades: their health was regarded by him as a matter of state business. Meanwhile he followed up the previous agenda of various governmental bodies such as the Council of Labour and Defence and the Lesser Sovnarkom. In the little time he had left to himself he tried to write up some pages of his booklet on the NEP, On the Food Tax. It was not his busiest working day; but it was packed with duties that, he felt, could not be performed without him. He had reached the age of fifty-one and did not have a minute to himself.
Political life was the core of his existence; he was not one to feel sorry for himself when duty called. Whenever he liked, he could request Stepan Gil to drive him out to the Gorki sanatorium, but generally he just got on with politics. Nevertheless he was dreadfully weary. He had coped effectively with revolution, war and even with peace and its problems. He had survived the loss of relatives and of Inessa. But he was enormously disappointed that he had not been able to depend on his fellow party leaders. In the winter of 1920–1 they had been more interested in internal polemics than in saving the Revolution, and the polemics did not cease in spring 1921: Lenin still had a job on his hands in holding the party to the decisions taken at the Tenth Party Congress. And when the leading Bolsheviks were not fighting among themselves, they were grasping after a respite from work; the intense wartime pressures were taking their toll and each leader experienced severe problems with his health. The Politburo became inoperative as one by one the members reported sick, and Lenin, despite his own chronic ailments, had to soldier on alone. He was working at the edge of his coping capacity.
But there was nothing else for it. Trotski was in an obvious state of exhaustion and had to have a holiday. Zinoviev suffered not one but two heart attacks and Kamenev too had a cardiac problem.7 Stalin had had to have his appendix removed. Bukharin had only recently returned from convalescence. Lenin had had lonely struggles in the past, but this one took as much mental toughness as any.
And it was in these same months that the question of the trade unions rejoined the political agenda. Alexander Shlyapnikov, the Workers’ Oppositionist leader, continued to stir up trouble in defiance of the Tenth Party Congress ban on factional activity. The central party leaders – those who were not in sanatoria or under the surgeon’s knife – assigned Mikhail Tomski as Chairman of the All-Russia Central Council of the Trade Unions to enforce the party’s will in the Metalworkers’ Union. Tomski, facing an angry audience, did his best but made several concessions to the trade union activists. Lenin plunged into a delirium at what he took to be Tomski’s act of betrayal, and demanded his immediate exclusion from the Party Central Committee. In the past Lenin had often got overheated, only to calm down a day later. Nor was it unknown for him to give an exaggerated display of passion in order to secure a political result. But weeks after the Metalworkers’ Union episode he was still raging to have Tomski flung out of the Central Committee and even out of the party.8
Lenin’s nerves were in shreds; his fatigue was extreme. For Tomski was not one of his critics but quite the opposite: he had been a steadfast ally throughout the ‘trade union discussion’ in the previous winter. Lenin thought his luck at the recent Party Congress would hold and that leading party colleagues would recognise that the supreme priority was to realise and develop the NEP. He felt especially isolated. It was clear that the NEP, which was passed into law in April and was starting at last to be imposed across the country, was not securely accepted in the party. For many – quite possibly most – regional and central Bolshevik leaders, the reintroduction of private trade in grain was repugnant. But then Lenin and Kamenev proceeded to add various measures in order to make the reform truly workable. They went beyond the original reform project, permitting peasants to trade outside their own locality and allowing commercial middlemen to operate; they gave extensive rights to rural agricultural co-operatives; and they gave little encouragement to state collective farms. They even sanctioned the return of small-scale private manufacturers to the industrial sector. The capitalist corner of the economy was filling an ever greater space. When and where, asked the Bolsheviks, was the process going to end?
In an effort to prove his revolutionary credentials Lenin finished his booklet On the Food Tax. His main contention was that Sovnarkom and the Central Committee back in 1918 had recognised the need for some space to be given to capitalism in the Russian economy. Thus the NEP was not new at all, but a policy restored. The onset of Civil War had intervened and necessitated emergency measures that he now referred to as ‘War Communism’. Such measures, he declared, could be suspended. Obviously there was some truth in this. But it was far from being the whole truth, and Lenin knew it, for the NEP allowed greater legal freedom for the peasantry to trade grain than had previously been available to them.
But no one was going to argue about the history of the Bolsheviks. As Lenin clearly perceived, his party was looking to him to show them why on earth they should still believe that the NEP was Marxist in orientation. On the Food Tax supplied arguments in abundance. He stressed above all that the NEP would not involve political concessions or ideological compromise. The supreme goal remained as previously: the consolidation of socialism and the further advance towards communism. He wanted, even under the NEP, to move towards elaborating a ‘uniform economic plan for the entire state’. He retained a penchant for terror and recommended the shooting of individuals for common fraud and corruption, for bureaucratic abuses and even for commercial profiteering: ‘It is impossible to distinguish speculation from “correct” trade if speculation is to be understood in the politico-economic sense. Freedom of trade is capitalism, capitalism is speculation: it would be ridiculous to close our eyes to this.’ So capitalism was not going to be done any favours. Rather it was going to be exploited by the Soviet state: capitalist tendencies in the economy would lead to the formation of larger units of production, which in turn would facilitate the incorporation of these units as state property in the near future. And capitalism would enable Russia to rise more quickly to the technical and cultural level necessary for socialism to be attained. The NEP was consequently, in Lenin’s presentation, a resumption of the road taken by the party since the October Revolution but interrupted by the Civil War, the road to socialism.
He put this case forcefully and directly at the Party Conference, held to discuss the NEP from 26 May 1921. He knew that he would have to deal with the delayed reaction of leading Bolsheviks to the NEP. As yet he could not predict the strength of feeling, but even he – the party’s fiercest polemicist – was shaken by the vituperation unleashed at him. There was widespread agreement that large-scale industry was being neglected, that workers were losing out, that the central leadership had not properly explained its measures and that the kulak danger was being overlooked. Lenin’s booklet did not escape criticism. It was said to be unclear and incoherent. Not a single speaker raised his voice in defence of Lenin. Not once in his long career had he been the butt of such a verbal mauling.
A furious Lenin came back next day for a debate on the recent débâcle in the trade union leadership. Lenin was not there at the start, but asked for the floor to express his lingering anger. After recounting the sins of Tomski, he suggested that the affair pointed to the supreme need for internal party unity. Not for the last time he argued that the basic danger to the Revolution was the clash between the respective interests of the workers a
nd the peasants. Factions might arise in defence of one or the other social class.9 The sole antidote was discipline. His plea was directed not only at avoiding a further trade-union débâcle but also at preventing a reconsideration of the NEP. Lenin’s passion swayed the Conference. It had been noteworthy that, although universal objection had been voiced about aspects of the NEP and its application, not a soul had called for its replacement. Acquiescence was on the rise. Tacitly it was agreed that fundamentally there was no alternative. The Conference had things it could be enthusiastic about. In particular, it agreed that ‘a merciless struggle’ should be started against the Socialist-Revolutionaries. No one was happy that the party was giving up its overt military commitment to spreading socialist revolution in the West. But Lenin cheered them up: ‘Of course, if a revolution occurs in Europe, we’ll naturally change policy.’10 This remark was never published. All that Pravda was allowed to report was Lenin’s prognosis that the NEP had to be kept in place for many years.
The toughness of his Conference performance jumps off the pages of the stenographic record. It was also a bravura display. He had invited pity by reciting the list of central party leaders who had let him down or had been ill. He had challenged his critics on their own ground. Strutting up and down the platform of the Sverdlov Hall, he had shown anger and determination. He had scattered his apothegms on Marxism through his speeches. When his orthodoxy had been questioned, he had laid into his adversaries. At no point did he relax his belligerent insistence that the NEP – the expanded version of the NEP he had developed since February – was the sole means of surviving the general crisis of the regime.
The viciousness of the debates was such that Lenin decided to keep the proceedings as secret as possible. The party had confirmed the strategic options it had taken since February 1921, and he did not want others to know how tumultuous an opposition had been proffered initially. He also needed to reinforce his victory over his party with a campaign against the leftist elements in the Comintern. The fiasco of the March 1921 Action in Berlin continued to rankle. Any repetition of such ‘adventurism’, as Lenin described it, might jeopardise the various commercial and diplomatic agreements that Sovnarkom had authorised since the beginning of the year. To Lenin it appeared self-evident after the débâcle in Poland that revolutionary expansionism had to be handled with subtlety in the foreseeable future. There was too much to lose. On 16 March 1921 an Anglo-Soviet trade agreement was signed, and one of its conditions was that the Soviet authorities would desist from subversive activities in the territory of the British Empire. Two days later a peace treaty was signed with Poland in the neutral city of Riga, capital of Latvia. A diplomatic deal was done, too, with Turkey. And for Lenin it was wonderful that approaches were being made to him by business circles in the USA and especially Germany. The protection and enhancement of Soviet interests appeared to him to be on the reachable horizon.
There were phrases he occasionally used, mostly with foreigners, which gave the impression that he was satisfied with this condition. He was a good conjuror. When he said that he favoured ‘peaceful coexistence’, many in the West began to believe that he was some kind of pacifist. But among his fellow communists, whether Russians or foreigners, he absolutely never expressed such a non-Marxist consideration. Why should he indeed? He still believed that Soviet Russia would eventually need to be accompanied by Soviet Germany, Soviet France and Soviet Britain. But he had always prided himself on being able to make the best of a bad job. He continued to sanction the secret dispatch of money, spies and propaganda to the rest of the world, particularly to central Europe. He did what he could to divide the capitalist powers among themselves. He did not explain how the balance would be kept between a rapprochement with such powers and an enhancement of the interests of global socialist Revolution. He had not worked this out even for himself.
One thing was clear to him: the Comintern had to be put straight about the need to avoid any kind of insurrectionary impatience that might endanger Soviet Russia by encouraging France and the United Kingdom to organise an anti-communist crusade. His last great effort of the year after the Polish débâcle was devoted to binding foreign communists to this policy at the Third Comintern Congress that opened in Moscow on 23 June 1921. He kept a wary eye on influential figures in the Comintern such as Karl Radek and Béla Kun. The Communist Party of Germany objected to being criticised for the March Action; its leaders continued to feel that they had only acted as Lenin’s Bolsheviks had done in 1917. Lenin quite lost his temper with them. Obviously he reckoned that they might make another ill-judged attempt to seize power. At the Congress he declared that the Bolsheviks had risen against the Provisional Government only after they had secured a ‘majority of soviets of workers’ and peasants’ deputies’ and that this was the true precedent for the German communists to follow. This was false history. It was not in fact until after the October 1917 Revolution that the Bolsheviks acquired an absolute majority even in the urban soviets. But by the end of the Civil War the myth was believed by most Bolsheviks – and perhaps Lenin himself believed it. And by the end of the Congress, on 12 July, he had got his way.
Lenin had had to be at his persuasive best. The problem was that he often lost his tactfulness. The Hungarian communists, especially Béla Kun, had taken offence at his commentary. For this, unusually, Lenin apologised; but he reasserted the correctness of his current policy and tried to suggest that he, too, had been wrong in the past:11
I therefore hasten to communicate in writing: when I myself was an émigré (for more than 15 years), I several times took up ‘too left-wing’ a position (as I now can see). In August 1917 I too was an émigré and made too ‘leftist’ a proposal to the Central Committee, which fortunately was completely rejected.
This confession had been a long time in coming. Unlike his other reference to the history of 1917, moreover, it was demonstrably true. It might be added that his proposal to the Central Committee not only in August but also in October had been disastrous. The difference was that his August 1917 proposal would have put his party’s existence in jeopardy but his insistence on carrying through his October proposal doomed his country to rack and ruin.
He was never going to reconsider the whole project of the Bolshevik seizure of power. His life and career were tied inextricably to the October 1917 Revolution, and he wanted the Comintern to accept that he knew better than any living communist, Russian or foreign, how best to protect that Revolution. He had done this with ferocity at confidential meetings of the Politburo and the Central Committee. The Red Army had been dispatched to suppress the Kronstadt mutineers and to kill the leaders and transfer the rest to Ukhta forced-labour camp in the Russian far north. He had approved the transfer of political commissar Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko and commander Mikhail Tukhachevski to Tambov with the task of rooting out the Tambov peasant rebels, if need be by use of poison gas delivered by aeroplane bombing raids. He had sanctioned violence against all those who had politically resisted the Reds as they moved into Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia. As in 1891–2, he had looked away when reports were made to him of the growing famine across Russia and Ukraine even though cases of cannibalism were widespread. He let the Cheka loose whenever industrial strikes took place. Not once did he give a signal that he was depressed. Not once did he say to a single associate that the October Revolution had been made in vain or that all the bloodshed was getting too much for him.
Instead he reflected on a year’s satisfactory work. But for him, his party would have thrown itself off a precipice. The NEP, by combining deep military and political repression with very marginal economic reform, was the barest minimum that could save the Soviet regime. He had seen this later than he could and should have done. But no other Bolshevik could have pushed the party into it. Days before the end of the Third Comintern Congress he was exhausted, and to the disappointment of the Congress he did not appear for the closing session. But he had done what he had set out to do. He could not afford to br
ag about this. But the triumphs at the Party Congress, Party Conference and Comintern Congress were the products of exceptional political skill. Without Lenin, there would have been no Revolution in October 1917. Without Lenin, the Russian Communist Party would not have lasted much beyond the end of 1921.
26. A QUESTION OF SURVIVAL
July 1921 to July 1922
Most of the basic components of Lenin’s New Economic Policy were in place. Peasants were allowed to sell their grain surplus to whomever they liked, and small-scale private manufacturing and commerce returned to the towns; and overt threats to subvert capitalism in Europe were put into abeyance. At the same time there was no slackening of the grip of the one-party, one-ideology state. The leading posts in public institutions were staffed by Bolsheviks, and the Cheka – redesignated as the Main Political Administration – arrested dissenters. With the exception of tsarist Poland and the Baltic states, the outlying regions of the former Russian Empire had been reconquered. Marxist tenets were given official precedence over every rival national, religious and cultural vision. The expectation in the party of Lenin was that sooner or later the world would be won for communism.
By mid-1921, however, Lenin felt inadequate to his personal responsibilities. The problem was not intellectual or political but simply physical; his health, which had never been wonderful, was in drastic decline. He could no longer put in a full day’s work. The chronic headaches and insomnia had got worse, and he had suffered a series of ‘small’ heart attacks. Having interrogated his doctors, he saw that they were in a quandary about their diagnosis and he turned for advice instead to his brother Dmitri. This had a positive result for one of his problems. Several specialists were suggesting that Lenin was suffering from stomach illness. Dmitri Ilich thought otherwise after watching him play skittles at Gorki, and told him that he was jerking his back at the game and thereby straining the sinews of his stomach. As soon as Lenin gave up skittles, the problem with his stomach disappeared.1 But, beyond that, Dmitri Ilich was as perplexed as everyone else and the other medical symptoms continued to give trouble. Lenin was so desperate that he stopped keeping his secret from the Politburo. He did this with reluctance since he was wary of interference by his fellow leaders. But he was caught in a trap of his own making. Having set the precedent of ordering sick colleagues to go to hospitals or sanatoria, he could not reasonably complain if the Politburo decided upon his own medical regimen.
Lenin: A Biography Page 57