Lenin: A Biography

by Robert John Service

  Probably this counter-accusation was at the back of Lenin’s mind as he composed his testament. Pyatakov had touched a raw spot, the same raw spot probed by Nadezhda Konstantinovna when she had upbraided him for neglecting petty hooliganism among workers and over-focussing upon grand policy.

  But Lenin was not engaging in self-criticism even obliquely. There is nothing in the record of his last days that indicates the slightest regret about the general course of his career. Yet, like all Bolshevik leaders, he sensed the negative propensities of Bolshevism: administrative crudity, over-optimism and boastfulness, schematism and scholasticism. The point was that each leader thought himself exempt from being influenced by such propensities. Thus Lenin simply assumed that it was only his fellow leaders who had to be warned about them.

  His ideas were not much more plausible as general political theory. In 1902 he had ridiculed the notion that workers could have a positive impact on the revolutionary process merely because they were workers. Why, one may ask, did he now suppose that a change in the Central Committee’s social composition by itself would save the Revolution? What had led him to believe that the next working-class generation of Bolsheviks was ready to take over from his own immediate colleagues? What induced him to think that Trotski, Stalin and the others would be unable to obviate any obstacles placed in their way by ordinary factory workers who were inexperienced in high politics? It was also surely a delusion to think that the party’s power rested upon the support of the workers and the peasants. Workers had been deprived of most of their political rights; they could not even go on strike without suffering at the hands of the Cheka. Peasants across the rebellious regions were still being suppressed ferociously by the Red Army. Only about one thing was Lenin genuinely astute, and it was an important thing. He sensed that, if factional disputes were to divide the party, Trotski and Stalin would probably be the leaders of the two factions. Practically no one else would have made such a prediction about Stalin; but Lenin had observed him at close quarters and recognised the ambition he possessed.

  Lenin therefore swore his secretaries to secrecy and ordered the copies to be put in a safe. This was the extent of his precautions. He went on assuming that everyone regarded him as the unchallengeable leader; he did not even bar Nadezhda Allilueva, Stalin’s wife, from working as one of his secretaries. This was naive in the extreme. ‘Letter to the Congress’ threatened to disturb the party leadership. Maria Volodicheva was so shocked by the contents that on 23 December she asked Lidia Fotieva how to proceed. Fotieva counselled her to show it to Stalin. When Volodicheva did this the next day, Stalin grabbed the typescript and went off to discuss it with Bukharin, Ordzhonikidze and Secretariat official Amayak Nazaretyan. He returned after a few minutes and barked at her: ‘Burn it!’7 This is indeed what Volodicheva did. But then she panicked: she had directly contravened Lenin’s wishes and big trouble could be round the corner. Lidia Fotieva and Maria Glyasser were equally appalled. Neither Fotieva nor Glyasser objected to the revelation of the ‘Letter to the Congress’ to Stalin; it was the act of destruction that gave them concern.8 There was just one way round the problem: Volodicheva would have to re-type a fifth copy and lock it away as Lenin had told her.9

  Stalin in fact derived little benefit from the information to which he had become privy. How he must have regretted that he had not slipped the poison to Lenin when he had begged for it. Now the situation was reversed. Stalin wanted Lenin out of the way whereas Lenin was striving to remove Stalin from office. Day after day, Lenin went on dictating notes on the institutions of the Soviet state, and with each extra section he found reason to criticise Stalin.

  Yet the scope of Lenin’s critique was always limited. Several influential accounts, in the West from the 1960s and in the USSR in the late 1980s, have suggested that he was advocating a massive reform of the Soviet political system.10 They exaggerated Lenin’s wish to change things. He did not challenge his own political creation: the one-party state, the one-ideology state, the terrorist state, the state that sought to dominate all social life, economy and culture. The foundations of his thought also remained in place. The October 1917 seizure of power, revolutionary amoralism, ‘European socialist revolution’, scientific correctness, ideological intolerance and a temperamental and political impatience: all these stayed untouched. Nothing in his testament challenged the tenet of The State and Revolution that a classless, egalitarian, prosperous society could be established only by means of socialist dictatorship. Lenin had made many shifts in ideology, organisation and practice since 1917; he was well known for the turnabouts he had made throughout his career. But about the inevitability of the establishment of a communist society and about the general strategy for attaining this goal he had no shred of a doubt. Lenin remained a communist believer to the end; he did not feel he had lived his life in vain or on false political premises. From his sickbed he was taking a last chance to offer guidelines for the scientifically assured achievement of Marxism’s global triumph.

  Resuming the dictation on 26 December, he called for the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate to be refreshed by the recruitment of new staff from the working class. Stalin as former chairman of the Inspectorate was bound to resent Lenin’s criticisms of its bureaucratic practices. Lenin added that the State Planning Commission and Sovnarkom should co-operate to increase the degree of planning and regulation in the economy. Here Lenin was hoping to appease Trotski, whom he needed as an ally in the fight against Stalin. Above all, he pondered a change of policy on the constitution. He even began to wonder whether he had been rash, in the prevailing circumstances, to approve the formation of a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). He noted that many state officials were ‘chauvinistic Great Russian rubbish’, and suggested: ‘There is no doubt that it would be appropriate to delay this measure until such time as we can swear by this [state] apparatus as being genuinely our own.’ Yet again he singled out Stalin for his ‘hastiness and administrative preoccupation’. It did not matter to Lenin that Stalin, Ordzhonikidze and Dzierżyński were not Russians. Indeed, they had become altogether too Russian, compensating for their non-Russian ethnic origins by refusing to protect the smaller nations such as the Georgians.

  By then it was too late to halt the creation of the USSR, and on 30 December the Congress of Soviets in Moscow ratified the draft constitution previously approved by Lenin and the Party Central Committee. But Lenin had the bit between his teeth: on 30–31 December he dictated an article ‘On the Question of the Nationalities or about “Autonomisation”’:11

  All that’s required is to call up my Volga memories about how non-Russians are treated among us, how every Pole has to be called ‘a little Polak’, how any Tatar is always referred to as ‘Prince’, any Ukrainian as ‘a Khokhol’, and any Georgian or any other inhabitant of the Caucasus as ‘a Capcasian person’.

  Therefore internationalism on the part of the oppressing or so-called ‘great’ nation (albeit great only in its acts of violence, great only as a chauvinist thug can be called great) must consist not only in the observance of the formal equality of nations but also in such inequality as would compensate on the part of the oppressing nation – the big nation – for the kind of inequality that is established in real life.

  This was not just a routine statement of Marxist belief. It also expressed deep feelings in Lenin that went back to his childhood. To his father’s commitment to building Chuvash-language primary schools for the Chuvash children in Simbirsk province. To the condemnation of racial oppression in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. To the upbringing at home which taught him that the cultivated Russian should eschew narrow national pride.

  In the same article Lenin made a striking apology:12

  I am, it seems, immensely guilty before the workers of Russia for not intervening sufficiently energetically and sufficiently sharply in the notorious question of autonomisation, officially known, it seems, as the question of the union of soviet socialist republics.<
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  Let us leave aside the fact that Lenin was saying only that it seemed he was guilty. Let us also overlook his reference to ‘Russia’ as if Georgia and other non-Russian countries were part of it. What is genuinely remarkable is the emotional tone. Lenin was baring his soul.

  On 4 January 1923 Lidia Fotieva took down an addendum to the political testament:13

  Stalin is too crude, and this defect which is entirely acceptable in our milieu and in relationships among us as communists, become unacceptable in the position of General Secretary. I therefore propose to comrades that they should devise a means of removing him from this job and should appoint to this job someone else who is distinguished from comrade Stalin in all other respects only by the single superior aspect that he should be more tolerant, more polite and more attentive towards comrades, less capricious, etc.

  This was political war: Lenin wished to remove Stalin from the General Secretaryship. A second point deserves emphasis. This is that Lenin’s addendum cut across his own earlier insistence that efforts should be directed at diminishing the rivalry between Stalin and Trotski. By himself attacking Stalin, Lenin was upsetting the balance of power among his close associates and, deliberately or not, lending weight to Trotski.

  Having started with the purpose of settling party affairs after his death, he was turning his attention to present difficulties. In particular, he sought to make a last-minute modification in the agreed constitutional plan for the USSR. He urged that the sole government bodies to be unified in Moscow should be the People’s Commissariats of External Affairs and of Military Affairs. All the other bodies, according to Lenin, should remain under the control of the various Soviet republics of the USSR. Rapid further centralisation of power in Moscow was to be avoided.

  Lenin then reverted to general political questions. The article ‘On Co-operation’ took up the problem of the low cultural level of the society. Lenin wanted to reinforce the state’s emphasis upon enhancing literacy, numeracy, punctuality and conscientiousness. He especially wanted peasants to join co-operatives: ‘We still have to do quite a bit from the viewpoint of the “civilised” (above all, literate) European so as to make everyone, to a man and woman, participate – and participate not passively but actively in co-operative operations.’14 At that moment, Lenin believed, the peasantry traded ‘in an Asiatic fashion’.15 He had always thought this way. But it was unusual of him to use such vocabulary openly. His words implied the notion that Asia lacked civilisation and that Russia was more Asiatic than European. Lenin had always been impatient with the primitiveness of Russian economic and social conditions. Characteristically he singled out the peasants for adverse comment. A class-based perspective remained in everything he wrote, even though most Russian workers differed little from the average Russian peasant in attitudes and technical proficiency. But of course, if he had been more realistic about Russian workers, his entire set of recommendations about the Party Central Committee and the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate would have been undermined.

  If there was any national group in the USSR he felt positively about it was not the Russians but the Jews. According to Maria Ilinichna, he was proud of the Jewish element in his ancestry since Jews had been responsible for political, scientific and artistic achievements out of all proportion to their number. Yet he was not a Judaeophile as such. What he admired in Jews was their active and positive role in building up a Western, European, modern culture in Russia. Lenin wanted Russians – and he thought of himself as a European Russian – to do the same. Thus there remained much to do before the tasks of the October Revolution could be fully discharged.

  Yet about his seizure of power in ‘an inadequately cultured country’ Lenin had no regrets whatever. In his review of Nikolai Sukhanov’s Notes on the Revolution, he quoted Napoleon’s dictum: ‘On s’engage et puis… on voit.’ Roughly translated, this means that a commander needs to get on with the battle before being able to see what military dispositions need to be made. Lenin was urging that power had to be seized before a coherent strategy could be elaborated. He also rejected the convention of contemporary Marxism that the social and economic prerequisites for socialism – a high level of industry, technology and education – ought already to exist in a country before there should be any attempt to establish a socialist state. In fact Karl Marx had entertained the possibility that socialism could begin to be built even in a peasant society; but this was not the general understanding of Marxism held by Russian Marxists in the 1890s. Quite the opposite. Russian Marxists had traditionally insisted that an industrial economy and a literate society were prerequisites for the inception of any attempt to construct a socialist society. Historical development, they contended, proceeded in an immutable sequence of stages. Lenin stood outside the mainstream of Russian Marxism: his implicit impatience with fixed historical stages had been observable since 1905, and he had made this explicit at the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920. As he lay dying, he wished to ensure that the party appreciated that this was no aberration. It was basic to his Marxism.

  And so there was no great change of substance in the last writings of Lenin, only a change in presentation and emphasis. On 25 January 1923, Pravda published his article ‘How We Should Reorganise Rabkrin’, albeit after some tacit criticisms of Stalin had been softened. Lenin then dictated a lengthy piece, ‘Better Fewer, But Better’, in which he again called for more workers to be promoted to public office. At one point he touched upon the problem that workers – in his condescending jargon – were ‘inadequately enlightened’; he suggested that they would have to be ‘worked on for a lengthy period’. But generally he trusted in the quick results obtainable by a reliance upon class-based selection.

  On foreign policy he added little to his oeuvre. He continued to believe in capitalism’s inevitable collapse. While recognising the signs of economic recovery in the West, he declared yet again that the Treaty of Versailles had resulted in the enslavement of Germany and had left Europe highly unstable. Lenin, however, had been scarred by the experience of the Polish–Soviet War of 1920, and he argued that the USSR should stay clear of conflicts among the great powers in the immediate future. On an optimistic note he continued to declare that such conflicts, so long as the USSR was not drawn into them, would benefit the October Revolution by distracting foreign states from mounting an anti-communist crusade. He added that the global after-shock of the Great War had not faded. The East, he maintained, was being shaken ‘out of its rut’. Colonies in Asia and Africa, even without the Communist International’s intervention, would give trouble to the European imperialism. This was not an original perception: Luxemburg, Trotski, Bukharin and others had said similar things in the past. But Lenin was not claiming intellectual primacy; rather he was declaring that the ebbing of revolutionary prospects was not permanent. He added: ‘These are the great tasks about which I am dreaming.’

  His article ‘Better Fewer, But Better’ was published on 4 March 1923 and the impression was growing that Lenin’s health was on the mend. This was particularly unwelcome news for Stalin. Through February, with the permission of the central party leadership, Lenin presided over the gathering of data on the Georgian affair by his assistants Nikolai Gorbunov, Lidia Fotieva and Maria Glyasser. Physically he could barely move. But intellectually he was still very sharp and his combativeness caused trepidation in the Central Committee since his Pravda articles had referred to tensions among the Kremlin leaders. One of the Central Committee Secretaries, Valeryan Kuibyshev, suggested that Pravda should give up printing Lenin’s material and instead produce a dummy issue of the party newspaper containing his work, which could then be sent to Lenin alone. Thus the party could be prevented from being unsettled by his accusations against Stalin. The central party leadership rejected Kuibyshev and sent a circular letter to the party committees in the provinces bluntly asserting that unity prevailed in Moscow.

  The situation was highly charged. By 3 March 1923 Lenin had received an exhausti
ve account of the Georgian affair from his helpers. The ammunition was in his hands and he had only to fire it at Stalin. This seemed a simple task. Around this time – we still do not know precisely when – Lenin learned from an unguarded remark by Nadezhda Konstantinovna about the verbal abuse she had suffered from Stalin. Lenin was livid. At midday on 5 March he summoned Maria Volodicheva and dictated two letters. One of these was addressed to Trotski, whom he asked to take up the Georgian Central Committee’s case on his behalf. The second letter was to Stalin:16

  You had the uncouthness to summon my wife to the telephone and swear at her. Although she has even given you her agreement to forget what was said, nevertheless this fact has become known through her to Zinoviev and Kamenev. I do not intend to forget so easily what has been done against me, and it goes without saying that I consider that something done against my wife to be something also done against me. Therefore I ask you to consider whether you agree to take back what you said and apologise or prefer to break relations between us.

  The dispute with Stalin exposed aspects of Lenin that he customarily kept private. Although Lenin the revolutionary wanted men and women to be treated equally, Lenin was also a middle-class Russian husband, and such men expected their wives to be treated with gentility by other men.

  There was really some excuse for Stalin’s exasperation with Nadezhda Konstantinovna’s pandering to Lenin’s wish to stay politically active; and Stalin, too, expected other men to respect his wife. But he also expected women to know their place and had tried to get his own wife Nadezhda Allilueva to cease being a party member. Lenin himself had had to intervene to get her party card restored to her!17 Even so, Stalin had overstepped the mark in swearing at Lenin’s wife. Lenin the prophet of Marxist amoralism was out to get him not only for his politics but also for his infringement of good manners.