A Patriot's History of the Modern World (26 page)

Lenin's close confidants recognized his oppressive direction early. Leon Trotsky saw the terror coming a decade before it arrived, but the inevitability soon became apparent to all: murder, mass terror, shooting, killing, exterminating, jailing—these all appeared as common terms for use against his “enemies list,” the schoolteachers, priests, nuns, Whites, kulaks, wreckers, traitors, or any other label he could affix to those who disagreed with him in any way. Sooner or later, almost every Communist insider of the Revolution ended up on the enemies list. Georgy Plekhanov, a faithful Marx popularizer and cofounder of Communist groups in Switzerland, soon found himself on the opposite side of Lenin, whom he viewed as a dictator. Plekhanov was fortunate enough to die of tuberculosis before Lenin could consign him to a firing squad.

Yet many stuck with him, recognizing in Lenin the single-minded focus on obtaining power that would result in the success of their cause. His opponents saw this obsessive drive in him as well. One labeled him a “political Jesuit,” another, the anti-Bolshevik Fyodor Dan, lamented about the absence of a Lenin on his side: “there's no such person [as Lenin] who is so preoccupied twenty-four hours a day with revolution, who thinks no other
thoughts except those about revolution and who even dreams in his sleep about revolution.”
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Lenin's will to power, and the elevation of the individual leader as the embodiment of the revolution, enabled him to accomplish much. With only twenty thousand core followers, he would conquer a nation of 160 million. In his 1902 pamphlet
What Is to Be Done?
he laid out the means by which he would seize power: he would organize and radicalize the elites, who, in turn, would agitate the proletariat into revolution. He said nothing about the peasants—who, in fact, would be the backbone of the revolution while the factory workers resisted.

Lenin had no interest in democracy, or process, or rights. Violence itself constituted the ultimate scoreboard, and he cared nothing for how a program or idea would be received by the people. Not just the masses, but the rulers, too, were insignificant gnats to be swept away—only the Bolshevik state could remain. Having determined that the revolution could come through the elites, he turned on them as soon as the violence started, shifting back to the Marxist claim that the bourgeoisie was now the enemy. Attempting to find consistency in Lenin's words or deeds was thus a fool's errand, especially so when his objective was power. That is why he could just as easily flip-flop on the war (one minute it was despicable, the next it was useful) as he could on prices later when he employed the very mechanisms of the free market he detested. Since the working class was not bolshevized, he easily switched gears to making the peasants the revolutionary arm. Who cared what Marx wrote? What mattered was moving forward to a Bolshevik state, not how one got there. As he told author Maxim Gorky, the party needed to “beat [the people] over the head, beat them mercilessly even though we, as an ideal, are against any coercion of people. [It's] a hellishly difficult necessity.”
¹⁵⁷
A useful intellectual exercise is to compare the predominance of the term “exterminate” in Lenin's vocabulary with that of “liberty” in the writings of the American Founders: the former never appeared in the works of the Founders, while Lenin never used the latter, even by accident.

The reason Lenin could so easily tack back and forth between invoking references to the “common man” and his own elite-oriented program lay in the concept of the “Soviet man,” a new person engineered entirely by the state. Any and all destruction of living, breathing people was sanctioned and even desirable, for the quicker the “old” man was eradicated, the sooner the new Soviet man could emerge. Practically, Lenin's logic led to the Red
Terror. Like Hitler's Germany and the Stalinist successor state, Lenin's revolutionary agenda could not have been implemented without the vicious application of force. Over time, the millions of people killed tended to be forgotten as a statistic, but Lenin had an obsession with murder in the name of politics. “How can you make a revolution without firing squads?” he asked, despite the fact that the Americans had pulled it off quite nicely just a century earlier.
¹⁵⁸
“If you can't shoot a…saboteur,” he asked, “what sort of great revolution is it?”
¹⁵⁹
As British historian Paul Johnson has noted:

To crush the kulaks he urged the Bolsheviks to “Hang (and I mean hang so that the people can see) not less than 100 known bloodsuckers.”
¹⁶¹
Lenin issued a similar set of orders in August 1918. One Communist paper boasted that “we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood.”
¹⁶²

Before Lenin could “kill” or “drown” anyone, he had to have control of the Russian government. But in February 1917, a series of strikes and demonstrations in Petrograd initiated the first Russian revolution. Troops called out to quell the demonstrations—many of them untrained or unreliable reserves not sent to the front—refused to fire on the crowds. Some mutinied; officers went into hiding; and the Czar's ability to stem the tide of protest vanished. When the Czar traveled to Petrograd to personally intervene, he found military and civilian officials aligned against him, and was persuaded to abdicate. On March 15, he stepped down, and six days later he was placed under house arrest. (In July 1918 the Czar and his entire family would be executed at a holding house in Yekaterinburg.) A provisional government took control, led by the brilliant orator and member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party Aleksandr Kerensky. A member of the Duma's Provisional Committee and vice chairman of the Petrograd Soviet (that is, “workers' council”), Kerensky was appointed minister of war in May 1917, but he could not marginalize or neutralize the Bolsheviks, particularly after Lenin arrived in April. When Kerensky allowed the war to
drag on, Lenin had his chance to lead the resistance, not just be its visionary, although the takeover of the Winter Palace was led by Trotsky in October.

The Bolsheviks' hold on power was tenuous. Not only did the monarchists and non-Socialists oppose them, but other groups on the Left struggled to grab power, and Kerensky enjoyed support in the middle of the political mix. These divisions enabled Lenin's bloody words to attain a sort of logical status. After all, it did appear that there were “enemies” on all sides for the Bolsheviks. When fellow revolutionary Isaac Steinberg asked Lenin why he even bothered with fancy names, Steinberg said, “Let's honestly call [the Extraordinary Commission] the Commissariat for Social Annihilation…” to which Lenin replied, “Well said!…but it can't be stated by us.”
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Consolidating the regime required terror, but it also demanded sensible strategy, which Lenin supplied: control the rail centers at Moscow and Petrograd, and eliminate recalcitrant officials. This was easily handled by the terror squads picking off opponents one at a time, and without a constitutional system of protective law, no institutions existed in Russia to stop it. All that vanished in the Red Terror.

The Communists also benefited from two other factors. First, although badly outnumbered, they were consolidated, whereas their enemies in the civil war that followed were split among three armies that rarely coordinated. The “Whites,” the enemy of the “Reds,” led by the czarist generals, had allies in the form of the Czech Legion of upwards of 35,000 volunteers who fought on their side. But these ultimately proved unreliable, and all too often the battle was not between the Whites and the Reds but also among a dozen smaller splinter groups that muddled the battle lines. Had the Whites managed to unite, either among themselves or with the other opponents of the Bolsheviks, Lenin's group might have been doomed.

A second factor that worked in the Bolsheviks' favor was the public dissatisfaction with the war. In June, despite a promise to the contrary, Kerensky's Provisional Government ordered new troop deployments to the front. Mutinies followed which Kerensky could not control. Although new demonstrations burst out, Lenin sensed it was still too early (the Bolsheviks controlled only about one in five of the delegates) and he fled to Finland while the uprising withered. Czarist general Lavr Kornilov, claiming the radicals were about to seize the Petrograd government, marched the 3rd Army into the city and asked for reinforcements—in reality plotting a coup. Kerensky relieved him of command, but not before being forced to seek help from the Bolsheviks. They called up the Red Guards, and Bolshevik
agents, instead of assisting the troop movements, slowed trains and halted telegraph communications. The coup fizzled, but in the confusion, Kerensky had sent signals that his government was weak and, worse, desperate for help in stopping Kornilov, he had armed his enemies from government weapons stores. War demands also led Kerensky to alienate the peasants when the Provisional Government's March decree requisitioned virtually all available food for the military.

By October, Lenin was convinced the time was ripe, and he returned to snatch power, forming the “Political Bureau” under Kerensky's nose on October 9. In November, Kerensky briefly led aborted attempts to retake the major cities before fleeing to France. Once in control, the Bolsheviks immediately announced a cease-fire with Germany, which provided masses of disgruntled men ready to claim their reward for years of fruitless combat. Entire regiments had returned to the cities by October, becoming prime targets for Bolshevik recruitment. At the same time, the peasantry was drifting into the Bolshevik camp, and the government's war-induced food shortages added to the interruption of the land redistribution program, also necessitated by the war. Once theft by the government seemed legitimized, order broke down everywhere, all to the benefit of the Bolsheviks. Resistance to government food collections grew so marked that five sixths stayed in the hands of the peasants, who hid and hoarded. On October 25, armed Bolsheviks took control at gunpoint, then forced the Congress to rubber-stamp their coup d'état.

No grandiose socialist slogans accompanied the Bolshevik seizure of Russia, no high-minded rhetoric about the good of the masses characterized the takeover. It was a quasi-military operation whose tyrannical nature was, temporarily at least, concealed by Lenin in numerous votes, appointments of “opponents” (such as the Mensheviks and Kadets) to power, and faux exercises of “democracy.” Lenin realized that by controlling the head, the body would follow, and therefore made no attempt to interfere with daily life or to publicly restructure the Congress. Instead, enemies would quietly be purged from the party—and killed. But he moved instantly to secure the real levers of power, slamming shut any newspapers that opposed him and running all news through two house organs,
Pravda
(“Truth”) or
Izvestia
(“News”). In latter years, a dark Russian proverb surfaced: “There is no Truth in the News, and no News in the Truth.” Indeed, the real truth was that Lenin was staffing the government right down to the local level with party faithful, overwhelming the people with lots of show elections.
For a population utterly unfamiliar with voting and unused to genuine democratic power, the result was predictable: Lenin got his men in the right positions.

By this point, Lenin's perpetual illnesses had returned, made worse by a series of heart attacks that increasingly left him incapacitated. Several candidates waited to replace him, including Trotsky, but none more vicious and determined than Joseph Stalin. Born in 1878, Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, a Georgian, Stalin was beset by injury as a child, suffering from smallpox, which left him with a pockmarked face; at age twelve he suffered permanent arm damage in a pair of carriage accidents. A seminary student, Stalin was expelled when he failed to pay his tuition, whereupon he landed on the writings of Lenin. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1903, operating chiefly out of the Caucasus, where he raised money through bank robberies and kidnapping. Calling himself Koba Dzhugashvili, he was captured several times by the secret police, but repeatedly escaped, even from Siberian exile. There is strong evidence that he became a police spy or informant for the Okhrana, the Czar's secret police, and later his Okhrana dossier became a subject of much speculation, particularly during the de-Stalinization of the USSR under Nikita Khrushchev. In 1912, Koba was in St. Petersburg when funding was obtained for the newspaper
Pravda
through the Okhrana, and was present when the first issue was created, largely through the efforts of another young Communist, Vyacheslav Skryabin, who took the name Molotov (Russian for “hammer”), although Koba would later attempt to take credit for the newspaper. When Koba was arrested again, he escaped once more and took the name “Stalin,” or “man of steel.”
¹⁶⁴

Lenin had watched Stalin rise through the ranks, an obedient soldier and reliable leader. He assigned both Stalin and Trotsky to the Politburo, where the two frequently clashed, although Lenin considered Trotsky a better military leader and more inspiring speaker and favored him for his status as a secular Jew. Stalin countered with three of his own supporters, Lev Kamenev, Lazar Kaganovich, and Grigory Zinoviev, and was able to whittle away at Trotsky's support. (Only Kaganovich would later survive Stalin's purges.)

As the first general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee from 1922, Stalin's alliance with Kamenev, the chairman of the executive committee, Zinoviev, full Politboro member and head of the Comintern, and Kaganovich, who was responsible for all appointments and assignments within the Communist Party bureaucracy, proved
invaluable. The Party had made Stalin Lenin's intermediary, but their relationship deteriorated and Lenin grew increasingly distrustful of the Georgian. Lenin's letter naming Trotsky as his successor was discovered by Stalin, who, in his official capacity as “caretaker” of Lenin's health, effectively buried the letter out of sight of the Central Committee, and Trotsky did not learn of the deception. With Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin plotted to excise two of his former allies, Kamenev and Zinoviev, who could become future rivals—as well as Trotsky—and by the end of 1926 had consolidated much of the Party's power in his own hands, helped considerably by Kaganovich, who placed Stalin's adherents in critical positions throughout the Party.