Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (41 page)

Lenin refused to recognize that although the quality of communists was part of the problem, the implications of the task they were being called upon to perform was far more important. In the dispute on trades unions of 1920–1, Lenin had coined a phrase which later became integral to the Soviet system. To follow the ‘anarcho-syndicalist’ plans of the oppositions would mean ‘repudiating the Party’s leading role in relation to the non-Party masses’.
¹⁰
[CW 32 43–53] In October 1920 he had cut down Proletkul’t for insisting that it should be autonomous. [SW 3 477] He had, in a letter of 11 October, made his position clear to Bukharin. ‘1. Proletarian culture = communism. 2. The Communist Party takes the lead. 3. The proletarian class = the Communist Party =
Soviet Power
.’ [CW 51 298–9]

Here was the crux of the problem. The Party insisted on playing a leading role in all spheres. From that all the other consequences followed. It simply did not have the resources to perform the task as Lenin wanted it to. From this perspective the antidote to bureaucratism was not purging, amalgamating committees, setting up new committees or raising the cultural level of Party members. The antidote was greater democracy, greater self-activity by the masses as called for by leftists in the Party, the Kronstadt rebels and others. However, to retract Party control would be to cease to be Leninist. The fundamental contradiction of Leninism becomes clear. Leninism needed politically conscious people to implement it. In its absence the steps taken to substitute for it were repressive and centralizing. Centralization and repression made it harder to ‘win over’ the masses to the necessary political consciousness, so central control became ever-greater. Lenin’s ‘solutions’ to the bureaucratic problem were really attempts to square a vicious circle. Once again the incompatibility of Lenin’s two great aspirations of 26 October 1917 – ‘we shall now proceed to construct the socialist order’ and allowing ‘complete creative freedom for the masses’ – could not have been clearer. The former ambition was stifling the latter.

The final panacea Lenin toyed with to deal with the problem and to establish the future of the Revolution was cultural revolution. As we have already seen, several of the comments about bureaucratism blamed the low cultural level of the country for shortcomings. It became a more frequent theme in Lenin’s final years right up until his last work, ‘Better Fewer but Better’, where he wrote that ‘we lack enough civilization to enable us to pass straight on to socialism.’ [SW 3 785] He had a low opinion of the capabilities of Russians. In exile he had warned against Russian doctors for their incompetence and the theme continued after the Revolution. In 1921 he tried to arrange for key personnel to go abroad for medical checks rather than face Russian doctors. He advised Gorky to seek help in a foreign sanatorium because ‘over here we have neither treatment, nor work – nothing but hustle.
Plain, empty
hustle’ [CW 45 249] and he had the psychological state of leading figures checked when a German specialist in nervous diseases visited Moscow in March 1922.
¹¹
He had also expressed a low opinion of Russian capabilities on other occasions. He complained to V.V. Vorovsky, the head of the State Publishing House in October 1919, that the published version of the report on the Comintern Congress was ‘A slovenly mess … Some idiot or sloven, evidently an illiterate, has lumped together, as though he were drunk, all the “material”, little articles, speeches, and printed them
out of sequence
… an unheard of disgrace.’ [CW 35 427–8] The experience still rankled months later when he asked Chicherin to supervise the collection of all available materials of foreign socialist, anarchist and communist movements in all languages. He specified that he should find a foreigner to handle the task because ‘Russians are slovenly and will
never
do this meticulously’. [CW 44 325–6] Such comments were the obverse of his point about Soviet Russia having ‘so few intelligent, educated and capable political leaders’. [Weber 157]

The evils of bureaucratization continued to haunt the Soviet system throughout its life. Both Trotsky and Lenin spent enormous time and energy on supposedly combating it but their responses were feeble. What neither of them would recognize was that bureaucracy was not an accidental deformation of the system, it was a structural consequence of Lenin’s (and Trotsky’s for that matter) approach to revolution. It arose from Leninism as surely as, for a Marxist, squeezing surplus value gave rise to exploitation. It was central to the whole enterprise. Lenin had expanded the concerns of the state in all directions. He was determined that state and Party developments should be controlled firmly from the centre by a tiny group of trustworthy, conscious communists. A military model of command from the top and obedience among the lower ranks was evolving across the whole system. The obvious result of all these factors was bureaucratization. Lenin’s failure to see this simple truth is not, perhaps, surprising in that it would force him to acknowledge a massive faultline in the entire project, but it was fatal.

‘All that is necessary to build a complete socialist society’

In one of his last works,
On Cooperation
, Lenin defended NEP as the road ahead providing certain modifications were made. These were that the importance of cooperatives should be recognized.

All we actually need under NEP is to organize the population of Russia in cooperative societies on a sufficiently large scale, for we have now found that degree of combination of private interest, of pri
vate commercial interest, with state supervision and control of this interest, that degree of its subordination to the common interests which was formerly the stumbling block for very many socialists. Indeed, the power of the state over all large-scale means of production, political power in the hands of the proletariat, the alliance of the proletariat with the many millions of small and very small peasants, the assured proletarian leadership over the peasantry,
etc.
– is that not all that is necessary to build a complete socialist society out of cooperatives, out of cooperatives alone? … Is that not all that is necessary to build a complete socialist society? It is still not the building of socialist society, but it is all that is necessary and sufficient for it. [SW 3 758–9]

To make them work meant spreading the idea of cooperatives. It there
fore followed that ‘strictly speaking there is “
only
” one thing left to do and that is to make our people so “enlightened” that they understand all the advantages of everybody participating in the work of the cooperatives, and organize this participation. “
Only
” that.’ It would take ‘a whole historical epoch to get the entire population into the work of the cooperatives through NEP. At best we can achieve this in one or two decades.’ [SW 3 760] ‘Given social ownership of the means of production, given the class victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie, the system of civilized co-operators is the system of socialism.’ [SW 3 761]

Two tasks (Lenin seems to have overlooked the earlier point that there was only one thing left to do) confronted the Party. One was ‘to re-organize our machinery of state’, the second was ‘educational work among the peasants’, the aim of which was to persuade them to organize in cooperative societies. His conclusion fused many Leninist motifs:

Our opponents repeatedly told us that we were rash in undertaking to implant socialism in an insufficiently cultured country. But they were misled by our having started from the opposite end to that prescribed by theory (the theory of pedants of all kinds), because, in our country the political and social revolution preceded the cultural revolution, that very cultural revolution that now confronts us.

This cultural revolution would now suffice to make our country a completely socialist country; but it presents immense difficulties of a purely cultural (for we are now illiterate) and material character (for to be cultured we must achieve a certain development of the material means of production, must have a certain material base). [SW 3 764]

On Cooperation
was Lenin’s last survey of the Revolution in general. His last two articles dealt, as we have seen, with the problems of the state and Party machines but the scope of
On Cooperation
was much wider. In these final paragraphs we catch many echoes of Leninist motifs. Clearly, he anticipated the balance discovered in NEP would last for ‘an entire historical epoch’ defined as ‘at best one or two decades’. Whether this would turn out to be the case depended on many things, not least the politician’s nightmare as defined by British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan – ‘Events, dear boy, events’ – but also who would succeed the ailing Lenin. Here, too, Lenin left the problem unresolved.

The succession

The question of Lenin’s succession has been turned into one of the great ‘if only’ myths of modern history. Trotsky’s interpretation, that Lenin was about to make a decisive move against Stalin in March 1923 when he was struck down by his third stroke, has gained widespread currency.
¹²
There are certainly some facts to support it. In late 1922 Lenin, for more or less the first time in his career, had serious differences with Stalin. As we said earlier, Stalin had not made much impact on Lenin’s life up to around 1920 though Lenin had had a major impact on Stalin. It may be that Stalin, back around 1908, had even chosen the name by which he is now known because it sounded like ‘Lenin’. He certainly admired and followed Lenin from around 1906 and became increasingly useful to Lenin as time went by. Lenin called him his ‘splendid Georgian’ but also had to be reminded during the war of what his name was, so one might conclude Stalin was still a marginal figure. Sverdlov’s premature death at the age of 34 had deprived the Party not only of a leading light but also of its filing system which, so the joke went, Sverdlov carried around in his head. Stalin moved into the administrative space Sverdlov had left and, coinciding with the moment that Lenin was turning to doers rather than thinkers, his timing could not have been better. Lenin used him increasingly for practical things, not least packing the Tenth Party Congress to ensure a Leninist majority over the oppositions. Stalin’s reward was to be promoted to the post of General Secretary of the Party in 1922.

The story of how Stalin turned the administrative power this post gave him into political power does not directly concern us here. What we do need to note, however, is that up to this point differences between Lenin and Stalin had been on a small scale, including Stalin taking a conciliatory position when Lenin was raving against Kamenev and Zinoviev in October and November 1917 and the moment when Lenin sided with Trotsky over the appointment of a military specialist, Sytin, to command alongside Stalin at Tsaritsyn in 1919. Stalin was, on this occasion, recalled but no grudges were held, at least not between Stalin and Lenin. Between Stalin and Trotsky was another thing altogether.

The case for Stalin being on the verge of losing Lenin’s favour has three components. The first is that, in his so-called ‘Testament’, officially entitled
Letter to the Congress
, Lenin, on 24 December 1922, described Stalin as having ‘unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution.’ [SW 3 738] However, on 4 January 1923 he added a special note about Stalin.

Stalin is too rude and this defect, though quite tolerable in our midst and in dealings among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a General Secretary. That is why I suggest that the comrades think of a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in hav
ing only one advantage, namely that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious
etc.
This circumstance may appear to be a negligible detail. But I think that from the standpoint of safeguards against a split and from the standpoint of what I wrote above about the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky it is not a detail, or it is a detail which can assume decisive importance. [SW 3 739]

Unknown to Lenin, on 22 December 1922, Stalin, who had been appointed to liaise between the Politburo and Lenin, discovered that, contrary to Politburo and Central Committee instructions, Krupskaya had been discussing politics with Lenin at greater length than the doc
tors allowed. Stalin swore at her in a manner only a Georgian can. Krupskaya was deeply insulted but did not tell Lenin of the incident. He only found out about it in March, when he was already disgusted with Ordzhonikidze and Stalin for engaging in crude bullying of Georgian Communists. Although, ironically, Ordzhonikidze and Stalin were both Georgians themselves, Lenin equated their behaviour with that of typical, heavy-handed ‘Great Russian chauvinists’ against whom he had been warning for several years. The revelation about Stalin’s rudeness was a last straw. On 5 March 1923 Lenin wrote to Stalin demanding a complete apology. Were it not forthcoming Lenin threatened to break all relations with him. Stalin eventually made a fulsome apology. However, by the time he made it Lenin had taken a severe turn for the worse, on 9 March, and was in no condition to receive it. Lenin was confined to bed and, as soon as he was well enough, on 22 May, was removed to Gorky where he lived out his remaining days.

The case that all this adds up to a decisive turn against Stalin appears strong but there are a number of mitigating circumstances. First, Lenin did not suggest removing Stalin from all his posts only that of General Secretary. Over the years, Lenin had quarrelled seriously with many other leaders, for example, Kamenev and Zinoviev in October 1917, Trotsky from 1906 to 1917. More recently he had had very open and bitter disputes with Trotsky and Bukharin over the trade union issue in 1920 and 1921. His criticisms of them were far deeper and more public than his criticism of Stalin and they went on for several weeks. Lenin, on 7 December, even found himself in a minority on the Central Committee (seven votes to eight) against their view of the role of trades unions. He accused them of bureaucratic excesses and of factionalism, perhaps the most severe accusation that could be made against a fellow Party member. Lenin simply steamrollered the Party into supporting him and took no further action against Trotsky and Bukharin.