Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (37 page)

By 1920, no real solution had been found to the evils of bureaucratism and careerism. The issue remained a running sore throughout Soviet history. Trotsky made it the chief plank of his critique of ‘Stalinism’ from the 1920s until his death. Panaceas were sought by Khrushchev and Brezhnev. The bureaucracy – the ‘administrative-command system’ – was the central target of Gorbachev’s reforms. Arguably, it was the bureaucracy which survived the Soviet system and grabbed Russia’s assets for itself after the fall of communism. Even though Stalin added to the bureaucratization of the Revolution there can be little doubt that it was an endemic feature of the Soviet, Leninist, system from the beginning. Lenin became increasingly aware of it and, in the reorientation of 1920–2, tried to deal with it again. However, before we turn to that last transformation we need to look at one other crucial agency of Leninism at this point and also examine how Lenin personally was bearing up to the pressures of governance.

Coercion and terror

The Soviet system was not built on force alone. Mobilization was as important. In the propaganda sphere, mobilization was uppermost. In the Party and administrative sphere mobilization and coercion existed side by side. At times, however, pure coercion – terror – was undoubtedly a crucial instrument. No aspect of Lenin’s rule has generated more heat and less light in recent years than this one. Increasingly tied up with cold war and post-cold war propaganda the issue has, since the collapse of communism, eclipsed most other aspects of Lenin’s work and life.

The end result is that he has been bracketed with a job lot of dictators – for instance, by US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who said, on 9 April 2003, ‘Saddam Hussein is now taking his rightful place alongside Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Ceauç
■
sescu in the pantheon of failed brutal dictators.’
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Arbitrary as such lists are, does Lenin deserve to be on them?

Some people are born violent; some achieve violence; some have violence thrust upon them. Lenin was not a violent person, he did not relish violence and would, like any civilized person, have preferred to live without it. In 1917 he said the workers should refrain from using violence unless it was used against them first. He did not participate directly in violence. Neither Lenin nor his party shared the fashionable ideas derived from Nietzsche (though Nietzsche himself might well have bridled at them) and some futurists and taken up by fascists in Italy first of all that violence was cleansing, that it was a positive force that tested the mettle of a man (sic) and brought out his most noble and heroic qualities. Although under Stalin there was praise for the armed forces, Communism did not develop a fascist-style warrior cult. Even in Stalin’s time soldiers were not portrayed as killers but as husbands and fathers defending their women and children. Unlike many other dictators who followed him, including Stalin, Lenin never wore a military or any other kind of uniform. He remained the irascible professor, the tutor of his unruly and ill-disciplined people. So where did the violence fit in?

In the communist morality to which Lenin subscribed the greatest good was the good of the Revolution. Whatever served revolution was right. There were no qualms about whether ends justified means, it was a given that the end of revolution justified almost any means. Lenin frequently said that one could not make an omelette without breaking eggs. There would have to be a necessary amount of suffering for the cause to triumph. For Lenin, to argue along these lines was not a matter of principle alone, it was simply reality. Revolution would be a violent act, like its cousin, war. It has been pointed out that the degree of violence in a revolution is, in many cases, directly proportional to the resistance offered by the old elites.
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Lenin made the same connection. The violence of revolution arose from the resisters, the former possessors of power and property, struggling to hold on to their ill-gotten gains and privileges. For Lenin the Revolution was a fight for justice, the resistance to it a fight for injustice. At some point, almost any revolution would have to use force to dispossess the exploiters, the ruling class, because it would not give in without a fight. From this point of view, it was the counterrevolution that defined the necessity or otherwise of violence and its degree.

Associated with this was the morality of class struggle. Again from the Marxist point of view, class struggle was not something invented by Marxists or the proletariat. All Marx had done was to identify the practice of ruling classes from time immemorial. Their everyday reality was to practise class struggle against their own people, even though many of them would deny it. Starting from this assumption, liberating the masses from class struggle meant waging class struggle back, defending the masses against the myriad weapons of class struggle, notably law, the state with its armed forces, religions which preached submission, the media and so on. Class struggle was a kind of war the tactics of which changed according to the situation. Peaceful skirmishing through strikes might be appropriate at times but in a revolutionary crisis the morality of national war and the reality of class war would fuse. What difference was there between a general sending people to their death on both sides of the conflict and a revolutionary leader doing the same? Didn’t the end of victory justify the means of violence in both cases? To refuse this fight was simply to allow exploitation to continue forever, to surrender to the vicious war waged by the elites. Another favourite expression of Lenin’s was ‘
Kto kogo?
’, roughly, who will do whom in? Class struggle was a fight to the finish. The Revolution did not invent the rules, it simply tried to turn them to the advantage of the poor.

Going beyond these theoretical considerations Lenin’s outlook on violence was, of course, deeply affected by the brutality going on around him. 1914–17 were the bloodiest years in human history. No previous bloodletting had matched the ghastly pace of the First World War. Tens of thousands destroyed in minutes, hundreds of thousands in weeks. The death toll made the worst previous historical atrocities pale by comparison. In Lenin’s view the ruling classes were responsible for this slaughter. In order to prevent it, even to eliminate war from human affairs, some violence was fully justified. Lenin could only snort with derision when bourgeois commentators accused his government of being violent. Imperialist violence, for the material advantage of the elite, using the masses as cannon fodder, was, he argued, infinitely worse than the violence of the masses trying to put an end to imperialist and nationalist ambition.

Lenin was also prepared to condone further forms of violence, including hostage-taking, retaliation and exemplary punishment. In the former cases Lenin believed the morality of revolution justified what ‘needed’ to be done. As far as exemplary punishment was concerned his practice differed little from that of European generals. Lenin expressed on numerous occasions that numbers of exploiters, swindlers and racketeers should be shot in order to send a message to others that such behaviour should not be tolerated. Deserters were also in danger of summary justice, including execution. On the western front French and British generals were also carrying out executions to quell simmering unrest among wavering armies. They also had a tradition of ruthless repression of colonial rebellions, using summary execution to control unrest, such as the Boxer Rebellion in China and the exactly contemporaneous Amritsar Massacre of 1919 in India. The scale was different, the practice identical. Like Amritsar, many tragedies arose from one man on the spot taking matters into his own hands. Lenin and his supporters tended to see criticism of their policies from the right as purely hypocritical. In their eyes they were giving the ruling class a taste of its own medicine.

Of course, two wrongs do not make a right and to understand Lenin’s position is not to condone it. Each reader can make up her or his own mind. However, it is worth weighing up these considerations in a world where imperialist, military and civil violence is rarely dwelt on compared to revolutionary violence. Whatever one’s view of the morality of Lenin’s use of violence, it is time to look at some examples.

In the first half of 1918 Lenin’s exhortations to terror tended to be related to so-called economic crimes and ‘sabotage’. Food supply was the main issue. Fearful that famine might take hold Lenin resorted to ultimate measures. In January he told food supply officials that ‘we can’t expect to get anywhere unless we resort to terrorism: speculators must be shot on the spot. Moreover bandits must be dealt with just as resolutely: they must be shot on the spot.’ [CW 26 501–2] The following day, 28 January, he sent letters to two subordinates urging them ‘Take the
most
decisive and
revolutionary
measures and send
grain
,
grain
and again
grain
!! Otherwise Petrograd will starve to death.’ [Weber 144] In May he returned to the same theme. In the ‘war for grain’ he urged the declaration of martial law and ‘shooting for indiscipline’. [
Theses on the Current Situation
, 26 May 1918, CW 27 406–7] His rationale was, as he put it in a letter, that the whole enterprise was at stake: ‘For
obviously
we shall perish and ruin the
whole
revolution if we do not conquer famine in the next few months.’ (By ‘whole’ he probably meant the international revolution.) [Letter to Shliapnikov, 28 May 1918, CW 44 95.] Incidentally, there is no known direct correlation between rhetoric of this kind and actual violence. Shootings and terror were endemic whether or not Lenin commented on it.

His discourse of ‘iron discipline’ and the so-far ‘excessively mild’ dictatorship had important repercussions for coercion, but it was the events of the summer which spiralled the issue out of control. The threshold was raised by the renewal of armed resistance by the Czech Legion in June and the Left SRs in July, plus the shooting of Lenin himself on 30 August, as a result of an assassination attempt by Fanya Kaplan, a disaffected SR. Lenin, unsurprisingly, called for the Left SR uprising to be ‘mercilessly suppressed’. [Weber 150] In early August he called on the authorities in Nizhnii Novgorod to take extreme steps to pre-empt a supposed White Guard insurrection. He called for ‘Mass searches. Executions for concealing arms. Mass deportations.’ [CW 35 349] Ironically, in the wake of his own shooting he was too ill to advise retaliatory measures. However, that did not make any difference. The Cheka was ready to step up its actions and in August and September organized terror really took off. According to official Cheka figures in 1918, there were 6,300 executions, 2,431 of which were for participation in revolts. 1,000 were shot for embezzlement. In 1919 there were 3,456 executions (excluding Ukraine). In 1918, 1,150 people died on the Red side fighting against these ‘uprisings’ and the like. However, the full scale of terror was much greater. It was certainly on a scale greater than anything seen under tsarism and may have reached 500,000 victims though the grounds for such a conclusion are unclear. There was also massive anti-Red terror and appalling pogroms which may have brought about comparable death rates. According to one estimate, 115,000 Ukrainian Jews were killed in 1919 alone.
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Unsurprisingly the desperate situation of 1919 brought further expressions of the need for summary violence from Lenin. Like those of 1918 they were directed against outsider individuals and groups trying to enrich themselves from the common misery. Former bureaucrats disrupting Soviet administration were a ‘scum’ that must be fought against. [CW 29 19–37] On 31 May he co-signed Dzerzhinsky’s article on the danger of spies as the Whites approached Moscow and Petrograd. Again unsurprisingly the article called for ‘Death to Spies’.
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The same crisis caused Lenin to urge another subordinate that ‘More hostages from the ranks of the bourgeoisie and the families of officers must be seized because of the increasing incidence of treason.’ [Weber 160] In August he declared peasants must be protected in bringing in the harvest and ‘robbery, violence and illegal procurement of grain by soldiers are to be ruthlessly punished by execution by a firing squad.’ [Weber 162] Later in the year, replying to Gorky who was trying to keep alight the wan flame of intellectual freedom in the dark night of 1919, Lenin claimed that ‘there was no harm’ in making intellectuals ‘spend some weeks or so in prison, if this
has
to be done to
prevent
plots … and the deaths of tens of thousands.’ [CW 44 283–5] As the situation improved, in December, at the Eighth Party Conference, he was able to announce that ‘our main difficulty is now behind us’. Terror was forced on Soviet power but now Soviet Russia wants to live in peace with its neighbours and concentrate on internal development. [CW 30 167–94 and Weber 164] From 1920 onwards the resort to terror was much reduced and disappeared from Lenin’s mainstream discourses and practices.

All the above quotes are from works of Lenin published long ago so it seems odd to talk of an
Unknown Lenin
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who resorted to terror and other kinds of chicanery. There are no aspects of Lenin’s outlook which cannot be figured out from long-published sources. However, a veil of secrecy was drawn over certain aspects. Violence against the church in 1922 was a major example. Lenin took advantage of the famine in 1922 to campaign to remove valuables from the churches. In some places, notably Shuia, the actions provoked major resistance. Prior to that, during the Revolutionary War, many clerics had been killed, some in support of the Whites, some executed by the Cheka, some as a result of the spontaneous violence endemic in the power vacuum of war and revolution. According to church figures, by 1920 322 bishops and priests had been executed during the Revolution. Another calculation put the figure at twenty-eight bishops and 1,000 priests who had died by 1923.
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Soviet sources remained very reticent about this and the most infamous quotation from Lenin supporting it was suppressed. In a letter to the Politburo of 19 March 1922 Lenin, as prone as his protégé Stalin to find conspiracies, interpreted the resistance at Shuia as part of a co-ordinated campaign against the Party led by Patriarch Tikhon, who had earlier anathematized the Bolsheviks. Referring to Machiavelli on the need to make brutalities short and sharp if they were necessary, he urged taking advantage of the famine to press home a Bolshevik counter-attack ‘because no other moment except that of desperate hunger will guarantee us the sympathy of these masses or at least their neutrality.’ He wanted to give ‘battle to the Black Hundred clergy in the most decisive and merciless manner and crush its resistance with such brutality that it will not forget it for decades to come.’ The most infamous passage reads: ‘The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing for this reason [i.e. resisting the confiscations], the better.’ As far as quantifying these vague figures are concerned the only specific reference to numbers in the document is that ‘no fewer than several dozen’ clergy and associates should be arrested and tried. Needless to say, Lenin specified that the whole operation of confiscation required the appointment of ‘the best [Party] workers’.
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This example, like most of the others, fits Mayer’s interpretation of the close relationship between revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence.