A people's tragedy

*

Alongside new art forms the ‘dreamers’ of the revolution tried to experiment with new forms of social life. This too, it was presumed, could be used to transform the nature of mankind. Or, more precisely, womankind.

Women’s liberation was an important aspect of the new collective life, as envisaged by the leading feminists in the party — Kollontai, Armand and Balabanoff. Communal dining halls, laundries and nurseries would liberate women from the drudgery of housework and enable them to play an active role in the revolution. ‘Women of Russia, Throw Away Your Pots and Pans!’, read one Soviet poster. The gradual dissolution of the ‘bourgeois’ family through liberal reform of the laws on marriage, divorce and abortion would, it was supposed, liberate women from their husbands’ tyranny. The Women’s Department of the Central Committee Secretariat (Zhenotdel), established in 1919, set itself the task to ‘refashion women’ by mobilizing them into local political work and by educational propaganda. Kollontai, who became the head of Zhenotdel on Armand’s death in 1920, also advocated a sexual revolution to emancipate women. She preached ‘free love’ or ‘erotic friendships’ between men and women as two equal partners, thus liberating women from the ‘servitude of marriage’ and both sexes from the burdens of monogamy. It was a philosophy she practised herself with a long succession of husbands and lovers, including Dybenko, the Bolshevik sailor seventeen years her junior whom she married in 1917, and, by all accounts, the King of Sweden, with whom she took up as the Soviet (and the first ever female) Ambassador in Stockholm during the 1930s.

As the Commissar for Social Welfare Kollontai tried to create the conditions for this new sexual harmony. Efforts were made to combat prostitution and to increase the state provision of child-care, although little progress could be made in either field during the civil war. Unfortunately, some local commissariats failed to understand the import of Kollontai’s work. In Saratov, for example, the provincial welfare department issued a ‘Decree on the Nationalization of Women’: it abolished marriage and gave men the right to release their sexual urges at licensed brothels. Kollontai’s subordinates set up a ‘Bureau of Free Love’ in Vladimir and issued a proclamation requiring all the unmarried women between the ages of eighteen and fifty to register with it for the selection of their sexual mates. The proclamation declared all women over eighteen to be ‘state property’ and gave men the right to choose a registered woman, even without her consent, for breeding ‘in the interests of the state’.25

Little of Kollontai’s work was really understood. Whereas her vision of the sexual revolution was in many ways highly idealistic, she was widely seen to be encouraging the sexual promiscuity and moral anarchy which swept through Russia after 1917. Lenin himself had no time for such matters, being himself something of a prude, and condemned the so-called ‘glass-of-water’ theory of sexual matters attributed to Kollontai — that in a Communist society the satisfaction of one’s sexual desires should be as straightforward as drinking a glass of water — as ‘completely un-Marxist’. ‘To be sure,’ he wrote, ‘thirst has to be quenched. But would a normal person lie down in the gutter and drink from a puddle?’ Local Bolsheviks were dismissive of ‘women’s work’, nicknaming Zhenotdel the ‘babotdel’ (from the word ‘baba’, a peasant wife). Even the women themselves were suspicious of the idea of sexual liberation, especially in the countryside, where patriarchal attitudes died hard. Many women were afraid that communal nurseries would take away their children and make them orphans of the state. They complained that the liberal divorce laws of 1918 had merely made it easier for men to escape their responsibilities to their wives and children. And the statistics bore them out. By the early 1920s the divorce rate in Russia had become by far the highest in Europe — twenty-six times higher than in bourgeois Europe. Working-class women strongly disapproved of the liberal sexuality preached by Kollontai, seeing it (not without reason) as a licence for their men to behave badly towards women. They placed greater value on the old-fashioned notion of marriage, rooted in the peasant household, as a shared economy with a sexual division of labour for the raising of a family.26

It was not just in sexual matters that Lenin disapproved of experimentation. In artistic matters he was as conservative as any other nineteenth-century bourgeois. Lenin had no time for the avant-garde. He thought that their revolutionary statues were a ‘mockery and distortion’ of the socialist tradition — one projected statue depicting Marx standing on top of four elephants had him foaming at the mouth — and he dismissed Mayakovsky’s best-known poem, ‘150,000,000’, as so much ‘nonsense, arrant stupidity and pretentiousness’. (Many readers might agree.) Once the civil war was over Lenin took a close look at the work of Proletkult — and decided to close it down. During the autumn of 1920 its subsidy was drastically cut back, Bogdanov was removed from its leadership, and Lenin launched an attack on its basic principles. The Bolshevik leader was irritated by the iconoclastic bias of Proletkult, preferring to stress the need to build on the cultural achievements of the past, and he saw its autonomy as a growing political threat. He saw it as ‘Bogdanov’s faction’. Proletkult certainly had much in common with the Workers’ Opposition, stressing as it did the need to overthrow the cultural hegemony of the bourgeoisie, as still manifested in the employment of the ‘bourgeois specialists’, and indeed shortly later in the NEP itself. There was in this sense a direct link between the anti-bourgeois sentiments of the Proletkult and Stalin’s own ‘cultural revolution’. From Lenin’s viewpoint, closing down the Proletkult was an integral aspect of the transition to the NEP. While the NEP was a Thermidor in the economic field this cessation of the war on ‘bourgeois art’ was a Thermidor in the cultural one. Both stemmed from the recognition that in a backward country such as Russia the achievements of the old civilization had to be maintained as a base on which to build the socialist order. There were no short-cuts to Communism.

Lenin wrote a great deal at this time on the need for a ‘cultural revolution’. It was not enough, he argued, merely to create a Workers’ State; one also had to create the cultural conditions for the long transition to socialism. What he stressed in his conception of the cultural revolution was not proletarian art and literature but proletarian science and technology. Whereas Proletkult looked to art as a means of human liberation, Lenin looked to science as a means of human transformation — turning people into ‘cogs’ of the state.fn5 He wanted the ‘bad’ and ‘illiterate’ Russian workers to be ‘schooled in the culture of capitalism’ — to become skilled and disciplined workers and to send their sons to engineering college — so that the country could overcome its backwardness in the transition towards socialism.27 Bolshevism was nothing if not a strategy of modernization.

Lenin’s emphasis on the need for a narrow scientific training was reflected in the change in education policies during 1920–1. The Bolsheviks viewed education as one of the main channels of human transformation: through the schools and the Communist leagues for children and youth (the Pioneers and the Komsomol) they would indoctrinate the next generation in the new collective way of life. As Lilina Zinoviev, one of the pioneers of Soviet schooling, declared at a Congress of Public Education in 1918:

We must make the young generation into a generation of Communists. Children, like soft wax, are very malleable and they should be moulded into good Communists … We must rescue children from the harmful influence of family life … We must nationalise them. From the earliest days of their little lives, they must find themselves under the beneficent influence of Communist schools. They will learn the ABC of Communism … To oblige the mother to give her child to the Soviet State — that is our task.

The basic model of the Soviet school was the Unified Labour School. Established in 1918, it was designed to give all children a free and general education up to the age of fourteen. The practical difficulties of the civil war, however, meant that few such schools were actually established. During 1920 a number of Bolshevik and trade union leaders began to call for a narrower system of vocational training from an early age. Influenced by Trotsky’s plans for militarization, they stressed the need to subordinate the educational system to the demands of the economy: Russia’s industries needed skilled technicians and it was the schools’ job to produce them. Lunacharsky opposed these calls, seeing them as an invitation to renounce the humanist goals of the revolution which he had championed since his Vperedist days. Having taken power in the name of the workers, the Bolsheviks, he argued, were obliged to educate their children, to raise them up to the level of the intelligentsia, so that they became the ‘masters of industry’. It was not enough merely to teach them how to read and write before turning them into apprentices. This would reproduce the class divisions of capitalism, the old culture of Masters and Men separated by their power over knowledge. Thanks to Lunacharsky’s efforts, the polytechnical principles of 1918 were basically retained. But in practice there was a growing emphasis on narrow vocational training with many children, especially orphans in state care, forced into factory apprenticeships from as early as the age of nine and ten.28

Lenin’s patronage of Taylorist ideas ran in parallel with this trend. He had long hailed the American engineer F. W. Taylor’s theories of ‘scientific management’ — using time-and-motion studies to subdivide and automate the tasks of industry — as a means of remoulding the psyche of the worker, making him into a disciplined being, and thus remodelling the whole of society along mechanistic lines. Lenin encouraged the cult of Taylorism which flourished in Russia at this time. The scientific methods of Taylor and Henry Ford were said to hold the key to a bright and prosperous future. Even remote villagers knew the name of Ford (some of them thought he was a sort of god guiding the work of Lenin and Trotsky). Alexei Gastev (1882–1941), the Bolshevik engineer and poet, took these Taylorist principles to their extreme. As the head of the Central Institute of Labour, established in 1920, he carried out experiments to train the workers so that they would end up acting like machines. Hundreds of identically dressed trainees would be marched in columns to their benches, and orders would be given out by buzzes from machines. The workers were trained to hammer correctly by holding a hammer attached to and moved by a hammering machine so that after half an hour they had internalized its mechanical rhythm. The same process was repeated for chiselling, filing and other basic skills. Gastev’s aim, by his own admission, was to turn the worker into a sort of ‘human robot’ (a word, not coincidentally, derived from the Russian verb to work, rabotat’). Since Gastev saw machines as superior to human beings, he thought this would represent an improvement in humanity. Indeed he saw it as the next logical step in human evolution. Gastev envisaged a brave new world where ‘people’ would be replaced by ‘proletarian units’ so devoid of personality that there would not even be a need to give them names. They would be classified instead by ciphers such as ‘A, B, C, or 325, 075, 0, and so on’. These automatons would be like machines, ‘incapable of individual thought’, and would simply obey their controllers. A ‘mechanized collectivism’ would ‘take the place of the individual personality in the psychology of the proletariat’. There would no longer be a need for emotions, and the human soul would no longer be measured ‘by a shout or a smile but by a pressure gauge or a speedometer’. This nightmare utopia was satirized by Zamyatin in his novel We (1924), which inspired Orwell’s 1984. Zamyatin depicted a future world of robot-like beings, the ‘we’, who are known by numbers instead of names and whose lives are programmed in every detail. The satire was dangerous enough for We to remain banned in the Soviet Union for over sixty years.

Gastev’s vision of the mechanized society was no idle fantasy. He believed it was just around the corner. The ABC of Communism, written by Bukharin and Preobrazhensky in 1919, claimed that a ‘new world’ with ‘new people and customs’, in which everything was ‘precisely calculated’, would soon come into existence. The mechanistic motifs of Proletkult art were supposed to foster this new Machine World. There was even a League of Time, whose 25,000 members in 800 local branches by the time Zamyatin wote We, kept a ‘chronocard’ on which they recorded how they spent each minute of their day (‘7.00 a.m. got out of bed; 7.01 a.m. went to the lavatory’) so as to be more efficient in their use of time. The crusaders of this clockwork world wore oversized wristwatches (there is still a fashion for them in Russia today). As self-appointed ‘Time Police’, they went round factories and offices trying to stamp out ‘Oblomovism’, that very Russian habit of the wastage of time. Another one of their plans to save time consisted of replacing the long words and official titles of the Russian language with shorter ones or acronyms. Politicians were told to cut their verbose comments, and speakers at congresses to keep their speeches short.29

*

The war against religion played a vital role in this battle for the people’s soul. The Bolsheviks saw religion as a sign of backwardness (the ‘opium of the masses’) and the Church as a rival to their power. In particular, they saw the religion of the peasants as a fundamental cultural gulf between their own Enlightenment ideals and the ‘dark’ people of the countryside, a people they could neither understand nor ever really hope to convert to their cause. The war against religion was thus an aspect of their broader campaign to conquer the ‘otherness’ of the peasantry.

Until 1921 the war against religion was fought mainly by propaganda means. The Bolsheviks encouraged the popular wave of anti-clericalism that had swept away the Church lands in 1917. The Decree on the Separation of Church and State in January 1918 aimed to place the clergy at the mercy of the local population by taking away its rights to own property — church buildings were henceforth to be rented from the Soviets — or to charge for religious services. Religious instruction in schools was also outlawed. Bolshevik propaganda caricatured the clergy as fat parasites living off the backs of the peasantry and plotting for the return of the Tsar. Most provincial newspapers had regular columns on the ‘counter-revolutionary’ activities of the local priests, although in fact most of the parish clergy had either gone or been dragged along with the peasant revolution. Needless to say, the Cheka jails were full of priests.

The aim of Bolshevik propaganda was to replace the worship of God with veneration of the state, to substitute revolutionary icons for religious ones. Communism was the new religion, Lenin and Trotsky its new arch-priests. In this sense the Bolshevik war against religion went one step further than the Jacobin dechristianization campaigns: its aim was not just to undermine religion but to appropriate its powers for the state.

On the one hand was the Bolsheviks’ iconoclastic propaganda. Christian miracles were exposed as myths. Coffins said to hold the ‘incorruptible’ relics of Russian saints were opened up and found to contain bare skeletons or, in some cases, wax effigies. The celebrated ‘weeping icons’ were shown to be operated by rubber squeezers that produced ‘tears’ when an offering was made. The peasantry’s attachment to religious and superstitious explanations was ridiculed as foolish: harvest failures and epidemics were to be avoided by agronomic and meteorological science rather than prayer and rituals in the fields. ‘Godless acres’ were farmed beside ‘God’s acres’ — the former treated with chemical fertilizers, the latter with holy water — to drive home the point. Peasants were taken for rides by aeroplane so that they could see for themselves that there were no angels or gods in the sky. Most of the local press had special columns for this sort of ‘scientific atheism’. Hundreds of atheistic pamphlets and stories were also published. Literature and music deemed to be religious were suppressed. The works of Plato, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Tolstoy were all banned on these grounds, as was Mozart’s Requiem, nearly all of Bach and the Vespers of Rachmaninov. There was also an atheist art — one especially blasphemous poster showed the Virgin Mary with a pregnant belly longing for a Soviet abortion — and an equally iconoclastic theatre and cinema of the Godless. Then there were study groups and evening classes in this ‘science’ of atheism (a good grounding in it was essential for advancement in the party-state). A Union of the Militant Godless was established in 1921 with its own national newspaper and hundreds of local branches which held ‘debates’ with the clergy on the question: ‘Does God Exist?’ These debates usually involved the staged conversion of at least one priest, who would suddenly announce that he had been convinced that God did not exist, and would call on the Soviet authorities to forgive him his error. Most of these priests must have been tortured in the Cheka jails, or else threatened with imprisonment, in order to make them confess in this way. Even so, the victory of the Godless was by no means assured. In one debate the priest asked the Godless who had made the natural world. When they replied that Nature had made itself through evolution there were hoots of laughter from the peasant audience, to whom such a proposition seemed quite ridiculous, and a victory for the priest was declared.30

On the other hand was the Bolshevik propaganda which held up Communism as the new religion. The festivals, rituals and symbols of the Communist state were consciously modelled on their Christian equivalents — which they sought to replace. Soviet festivals were scheduled on the same days as the old religious holidays: there was a Komsomol Christmas and Easter; Electric Day fell on Elijah Day; Forest Day (a throwback to the peasant-pagan past) on Trinity Sunday. May Day and Revolution Day were heavily overladen with religious symbolism: the armed march past the Kremlin, the religious centre of Orthodox Russia, was clearly reminiscent of the old religious procession, only with rifles instead of crosses. The cult of Lenin, which flourished in the civil war, gave him the status of a god. The very symbol of the Communist state, the Red Star, was steeped in religious and messianic meaning deeply rooted in Russian folklore.

A Red Army leaflet of 1918 explained to the servicemen why the Red Star appeared on the Soviet flag and their uniforms. There was once a beautiful maiden named Pravda (Truth) who had a burning red star on her forehead which lit up the whole world and brought it truth, justice and happiness. One day the red star was stolen by Krivda (Falsehood) who wanted to bring darkness and evil to the world. Thus began the rule of Krivda. Meanwhile, Pravda called on the people to retrieve her star and ‘return the light of truth to the world’. A good youth conquered Krivda and her forces and returned the red star to Pravda, whereupon the evil forces ran away from the light ‘like owls and bats’, and ‘once again the people lived by truth’. The leaflet made the parable clear: ‘So the Red Star of the Red Army is the star of Pravda. And the Red Army servicemen are the brave lads who are fighting Krivda and her evil supporters so that truth should rule the world and so that all those oppressed and wronged by Krivda, all the poor peasants and workers, should live well and in freedom.’31

In private life, as in public, religious rituals were Bolshevized. Instead of baptisms children were ‘Octobered’. The parents at these ceremonies, which boomed in the early 1920s, promised to bring up their children in the spirit of Communism; portraits of the infant Lenin were given as gifts; and the Internationale was sung. The names chosen for these Octobered children — and indeed for adults who also changed their names — were drawn from the annals of the revolution: Marx; Engelina; Rosa (after Rosa Luxemburg); Vladlen, Ninel, Ilich and Ilina (acronyms, nicknames or anagrams for Lenin); Marlen (for Marx and Lenin); Melor (for Marx, Engels, Lenin and October Revolution); Pravda; Barrikada; Fevral (February); Oktiabrina (October); Revoliutsiia (Revolution); Parizhkommuna (Paris Commune); Molot (hammer); Serpina (sickle); Dazmir (Long Live the World Revolution); Diktatura (Dictatorship); and Terrora (Terror). Sometimes the names were chosen on the basis of a misunderstanding or simply because they were foreign sounding and were thus associated with the revolution: Traviata, Markiza, Embryo and Vinaigrette. Red weddings were another Bolshevik ritual, popular among the Komsomol youth. They were usually held in a factory or some local club. Instead of the altar the couple faced a portrait of Lenin. They made their vows of loyalty both to each other and to the principles of Communism. In his satirical novel Dog’s Wedding (1925), Brykin reproduced such a vow. ‘Do you promise’, asks the officiator, ‘to follow the path of Communism as bravely as you are now opposing the church and the old people’s customs? Are you going to make your children serve as Young Pioneers [the Komsomol organization for younger children], educate them, introduce scientific farming methods, and fight for the world revolution? Then in the name of our leader, Comrade Vladimir Ilich Lenin, I declare the Red Marriage completed.’ Finally, there was the Red Funeral, mainly reserved for Bolshevik heroes, which drew on the funereal traditions of the revolutionary movement — with its guard of honour, the coffin set high on a bier draped in red, the dirgelike hymn ‘You Fell Victim’, the graveside orations and the gunfire salute — originally used at Bauman’s burial, that first martyred Bolshevik, in 1905.32

From 1921 the war against religion moved from words and rituals to the closure of churches and the shooting of priests. Lenin instigated this totally gratuitous reign of terror. Apart from the Academy of Sciences, the Church was the only remaining national institution outside the control of the party. Three years of propaganda had not undermined it — in many ways the civil war had made people turn to religion even more — so Lenin sought to attack it directly. The famine of 1921–2 gave him the pretext he needed. Although the Church had actively joined in the famine relief campaign, offering to sell some of its non-consecrated valuables to buy foodstuffs from abroad, Lenin found a strategy that enabled him to accuse it of selfishly turning its back on the crisis. He ordered the Church to hand over its consecrated valuables for sale as well, even though he must have known that it was obliged to disobey the order (the secular use of consecrated items was sacrilegious). This provocation would make the Church appear as it was charged — as an ‘enemy of the people’. To rally the public against it the press called hysterically for all the Church’s valuables to be sold for the famine victims: ‘Turn Gold into Bread!’ was the emotive slogan. In a last desperate effort to prevent the pillage of his churches, Patriarch Tikhon offered to raise money equivalent to the value of the consecrated items through voluntary subscriptions and the sale of other property; but his offer was refused. Lenin was not interested in the money; he wanted a pretext to assault the Church.

On 26 February 1922 a decree was sent out to the local Soviets instructing them to remove from the churches all precious items, including those used for religious worship. The decree claimed that their sale was necessary to help the famine victims; but little of the money raised was used for this purpose. Armed bands gutted the local churches, carrying away the icons and crosses, the chalices and mitres, even the iconostases in bits. In many places angry crowds took up arms to defend their local church. In some places they were led by their priests, at others they fought spontaneously. The records tell of 1,414 bloody clashes during 1922–3. Most of these were utterly one-sided. Troops with machine-guns fought against old men and women armed with pitch forks and rusty rifles: 7,100 clergy were killed, including nearly 3,500 nuns, but only a handful of Soviet troops. One such clash in the textile town of Shuya, 200 miles north-east of Moscow, in March 1922, prompted Lenin to issue a secret order for the extermination of the clergy. The event was typical enough: on Sunday 12 March worshippers fought off Soviet officials when they came to raid the local church; when the officials returned three days later with troops and machine-guns there was some fighting with several people killed. The Politburo, in Lenin’s absence, voted to suspend further confiscations. But Lenin, hearing of the events in Shuya, dictated contrary orders over the phone from his country residence at Gorki with strict instructions of top secrecy. This memorandum, first published in full by a Soviet publication in 1990, reveals the cruel streak in Lenin’s nature. It undermines the ‘soft’ image of Lenin in his final years previously favoured by leftwing historians in the West who would have us believe that the 1920s were a hopeful period of ‘Soviet democracy’ before the onset of Stalinism. Lenin argued that the events in Shuya should be exploited to link the clergy with the Black Hundreds, to destroy the Church ‘for many decades’, and to ‘assure ourselves of capital worth several hundred million gold roubles … to carry out governmental work in general and in particular economic reconstruction’. It was ‘only now’, in the context of the famine, that the hungry peasants would ‘either be for us or at any rate neutral’ in this ‘ferocious’ war against the Church; ‘later on we will not succeed.’ For this reason, continued Lenin:

I have come to the unequivocal conclusion that we must now wage the most decisive and merciless war against the Black Hundred clergy and suppress its resistance with such cruelty that they will not forget it for decades to come … The more members of the reactionary bourgeoisie and clergy we manage to shoot the better.

It has recently been estimated that 8,000 people were executed during this brutal campaign in 1922 alone. Patriarch Tikhon claimed to know of 10,000 priests in prison or exile, including about 100 bishops. It was only after 1925, under pressure from Russia’s Western trading partners, that the persecution came to a temporary halt.33

According to Gorky, the Bolsheviks deliberately used the Jews in their ranks to carry out confiscations of church property. He accused them of deliberately stirring up anti-Semitism to divert the anger of the Christian community away from themselves. In several towns, such as Smolensk and Viatka, there were indeed pogroms against the Jews following the confiscation of church property. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks were closing down synagogues as part of their campaign against religion. The first to be closed were in Chagall’s home town of Vitebsk in April 1921. The Soviet authorities claimed that six of the city’s eighty synagogues were needed for conversion to Yiddish schools. The Jews quickly occupied those synagogues which had been targeted for closure and held prayer meetings in them. But the authorities removed them with troops, smashing windows, chanting ‘Death to the Yids!’ and killing several worshippers in the process. None of the synagogues was used as a school: one became a Communist university; several were turned into workers’ clubs; one even became a shoe factory. More closures followed in Minsk, Gomel, Odessa and Kharkov. Overall, 800 synagogues were closed down by the Communists between 1921 and 1925.

There was more than just a tinge of anti-Semitism in all this. The lower party ranks were filled, in Gorky’s words, with ‘old Russian nationalists, scoundrels, and vagabonds, who despise and fear the Jews’. The Military and Workers’ Oppositions, which mobilized their support from the lower party ranks, both used the rhetoric of anti-Semitism in their language of class animosity towards the ‘bourgeois specialists’. The early years of the NEP, which witnessed a boom in the sort of small-scale trading where Jews were traditionally dominant, strengthened this anti-Semitism. For the lower-class Bolsheviks, in particular, it was galling to see the ‘Jewish’ traders ‘taking over’ Moscow. During the civil war these ‘speculators’ would have been arrested; now they lived better than the party rank and file, while half the Russian workers were unemployed. The revolution, it seemed to them, was in retreat both on the class and the racial fronts. It was in this context that many of the more militant Bolsheviks began to argue, as Marx himself had done, that the Jews as a social group were synonymous with capitalism — that all traders were essentially ‘Jews’. Such ideas were prevalent in the Bolshevik campaign against Judaism which took off in 1921. The ultimate insult of this campaign was delivered on the Jewish New Year of 1921 when a mock ‘trial’ of Judaism was put on for propaganda purposes. It was staged in the same courtroom in Kiev where the innocent Beiliss (also read: Judaism) had been tried in 1913.34

*

The Bolshevik persecution of religion did little to weaken the hold of this ‘opiate’ on the minds of the population. Although the 1920s witnessed a decline of religion, especially among the rural youth who went to school or left the countryside for the city, this probably had less to do with the Bolsheviks’ efforts than with the secularizing tendencies of modern life. It had been happening in any case for decades. In fact, if anything, the oppressive measures of the Bolsheviks had precisely the opposite effect — of rallying the believers around their religion. Despite the separation of Church and state, the local clergy continued to be supported by the voluntary donations of their parishioners as well as by fees and grants of land from the peasant communes. Ironically it was not that far from the dreams of the nineteenth-century liberal clergy for an organic self-supporting parish. Even those who no longer believed in their religion with the same unquestioning faith often continued not merely to observe but also to show a strong attachment to its rituals. Octobered babies and Red Weddings failed to supplant their religious equivalents (which also happened to be more fun). People continued to bury their dead rather than cremate them, despite the shortages of coffins and graves and the free state provision of cremations, because, in the words of one morgue official, ‘the Russians are still either too religious or too superstitious to part from the Orthodox burial traditions’.35

As in religion, so in the fields of culture and social life, the attempt by the Bolsheviks to ‘make the world and man anew’ foundered on the rocks of reality. It was in many ways a utopian dream — one of the most ambitious in history — to believe that human nature could be changed by simply altering the social environment in which people lived. Man cannot be transformed quite so easily: human nature moves more slowly than ruling ideologies or society. This is perhaps the one enduring moral lesson of the Russian Revolution — as it is indeed of the terrible history of this century.

iii Bolshevism in Retreat

A letter from Sergei Semenov:

Andreevskoe, 21 January 1921

Dear Anna,

Life in the village has become unbearable. True, we are much better off than the peasants in the rest of Russia. Neither the food requisitioning nor the labour duty has really yet affected us. But we still suffer from the daily acts of robbery, stupidity and dishonesty by our local bearers of Soviet Power which make normal life impossible. The labouring people, in whose name all this has been done, no longer support the new regime. I will not write another letter of complaint to Kamenev [chairman of the Moscow Soviet]. As the proverb goes, ‘There is nothing worse than a deaf man who will neither listen.’

Despite the ending of the war and all the promises to get the country back on to its feet, our population does not believe the current authorities are capable of this. It is so fed up and angry, it is so devoured by the feeling of oppression, that it is incapable of positive thoughts and cannot see a way out of this situation. Many are despairing because Wrangel and the Poles were beaten — and yet nobody wants to admit that the answer to our problems lies not in changing things from the outside but in changing the way we live ourselves.36

The sense of anger and despair which Semenov’s letter expresses was shared by peasants throughout Russia. All the ideals of the peasant revolution had been destroyed by the Bolshevik regime. The peasant Soviets of 1917, which to a large extent had realized the old ideal of volia, of village freedom and autonomy, had been taken over by the Communists. What had been organs of peasant self-rule now became bureaucratic organs of the state. The revolution on the land, which had aimed to make the smallholding peasant farm universal, was now threatened by the collective farms. The gentry’s estates which the peasants had thought would belong to them were being transferred to the state. And what sort of state was that? Not one that helped the peasants to prosper. It was one that took away their only sons and horses for the army, one that prolonged the devastations of the civil war, one that forced them into labour teams and robbed them of their food. ‘The freedom we were given by the revolution was taken from us by the new regime,’ complained one peasant to a foreign journalist in January 1921. ‘Life in the village is now like it was under the Tsar.’

By 1921 much of peasant Russia had been brought to the brink of a terrible famine. While the famine crisis of 1921–2 was directly caused by a year of drought and heavy frosts, the worst affected areas were clearly those that had suffered most from the requisitionings of 1918–21. In Samara province, for example, the worst-hit region of the famine crisis, the amount of grain requisitioned during 1919–20 exceeded the actual harvest surplus by 30 per cent with the result that the average peasant household lost 118 kg of food, fodder and seed from its basic stores. In the harsh conditions of 1921 this often proved the difference between life and death. In the Balashov district of neighbouring Saratov province, where Cheremukhin’s murderous brigade collected the levy, the amount of requisitioned grain even exceeded the total harvest so that the peasants were forced to pay it from stocks they had accumulated in previous years and in the autumn of 1920 there was, in the words of one official, ‘no seed left to sow’. Throughout the grain-producing regions of Russia the Bolsheviks had deliberately set their food levies higher than the estimated harvest surplus on the grounds that the peasants would hide up to one-third of their actual food surplus. On this same basis the requisitioning brigades had indiscriminately seized whatever foodstuffs they could find in the village barns, often shooting peasants who resisted them as ‘kulaks’, even though, as many Bolshevik officials were forced to admit, these were usually the poorest peasants who would simply starve if they lost their last vital food stocks to the levy. During 1920, as the signs of the imminent crisis became clearer, provincial food officials pleaded with the Centre to call a halt to their disastrous levies. ‘There is simply no grain left to take,’ warned one official from the German Volga region in September 1920. And yet Moscow pressed for more. In the German Volga region 42 per cent of the paltry 1920 harvest was seized and shipped off to the hungry north. Villages were ransacked, children held to ransom, peasants whipped and tortured to squeeze their last few grains from them.37

To begin with the peasants defended themselves with the usual ‘weapons of the weak’: passive resistance and subterfuge. They buried their grain beneath the ground, fed it to their livestock, or turned it into moonshine rather than lose it to the Bolsheviks. They also began to take up arms in sporadic local revolts and rebellions of increasing frequency, size and violence. Two thousand members of the requisitioning brigades were murdered by angry peasants during 1918; in 1919 the figure rose to nearly 5,000; and in 1920 to over 8,000. By the autumn of 1920 the whole of the country was inflamed with peasant wars. Makhno’s peasant army, still up to 15,000 strong after Wrangel’s defeat, roamed across the Ukrainian steppe and, together with countless other local bands, succeeded in paralysing much of the rural Soviet infrastructure until the summer of 1921. In the central Russian province of Tambov the Antonov rebellion was supported by virtually the entire peasant population: Soviet power ceased to exist there between the autumn of 1920 and the summer of 1921. In Voronezh, Saratov, Samara, Simbirsk and Penza provinces there were smaller but no less destructive peasant rebel armies creating havoc and effectively limiting the Bolsheviks’ power to the towns. Hundreds of small-scale bandit armies controlled the steppelands between Ufa and the Caspian Sea. In the Don and the Kuban the Cossacks and the peasants were at last united by their common hatred of the Bolsheviks. The rebel armies of the Caucasian mountains numbered well over 30,000 fighters. In Belorussia the nationalist-led peasants took over most of the countryside and forced the Soviets of Minsk and Smolensk to be evacuated. By far the biggest (though least studied) of the peasant revolts broke out in western Siberia: the whole of the Tiumen’, Omsk, Cheliabinsk, Tobolsk, Ekaterinburg and Tomsk regions, complete with most of the major towns, fell into the hands of peasant rebels, up to 60,000 of them under arms, and virtually the whole of the Soviet infrastructure remained paralysed during the first six months of 1921. And yet throughout Russia the same thing was happening on a smaller scale: angry peasants were taking up arms and chasing the Bolsheviks out of the villages. Less than fifty miles from the Kremlin, not far from Semenov’s Andreevskoe, there were villages where it was dangerous for a Bolshevik to go.38

What is remarkable about these peasant wars is that they shared so many common features, despite the huge distances between them and the different contexts in which they took place.

Most of the larger rebellions had started out in 1920 as small-scale peasant revolts against the requisitioning of food which, as a result of their incompetent and often brutal handling by the local Communists, soon became inflamed and spread into full-scale peasant wars. The Tambov rebellion was typical. It had started in August 1920 in the village of Kamenka when a food brigade arrived to collect its share of the new grain levy. At over eleven million puds the levy for the province had clearly been set much too high. Even Lenin wondered in September ‘whether it should not be cut’. The 1920 harvest had been very poor and if the peasants had paid the levy in full they would have been left with a mere one pud of grain per person, barely 10 per cent of their normal requirements for food, seed and fodder. Already in October there were hunger riots. By January, in the words of the Bolshevik Antonov-Ovseenko, sent in to help put down the revolt, ‘half the peasantry was starving’. The peasants of Kamenka were relatively wealthy — which meant they starved more slowly than the rest — and an extra levy was imposed on them. They refused to pay this levy, killed several members of the requisitioning brigade, and armed themselves with guns and pitchforks to fight off the Soviet reinforcements sent in from Tambov to put their revolt down. Neighbouring villages joined the uprising and a rudimentary peasant army was soon organized. It fought under the Red Flag — reclaiming the symbols of the revolution was an important aspect of these people’s uprisings — and was led by the local peasant SR hero, Grigorii Plezhnikov, who had organized the war against the gentry estates in 1905 and 1917. Meanwhile, a network of Peasant Unions (STKs) began to emerge in the villages — often they were organized by the local SRs — which replaced the Soviets and helped to supply the insurgent army. Over fifty Communists were shot.

The speed with which the revolt spread caught the Bolsheviks in Tambov unprepared. The Soviet and party apparatus in the province had become extremely weak. People had been leaving the party in droves — many of them ex-SRs who soon joined the rebels — as industrial strikes and corruption scandals had made belonging to it a source of both danger and embarrassment. Because of the war against Poland there were only 3,000 Red Army troops, most of them extremely unreliable, in the provincial garrison. They had only one machine-gun for the whole of the insurgent district of Kirsanov. The rebels took advantage of this weakness and marched on the provincial capital. Thousands of peasants joined them as they approached Tambov. The Bolsheviks were thrown into panic. When reinforcements arrived they forced the rebels back and unleashed a campaign of terror in the villages. Several rebel strongholds were burned to the ground, whole herds of cattle were confiscated, and hundreds of peasants were executed. Yet this merely fanned the flames of peasant war. ‘The whole population took to the woods in fright and joined the rebels,’ reported one local Communist. ‘Even peasants once loyal to us had nothing left to lose and threw in their lot with the revolt.’ From Kirsanov the rebellion soon spread throughout the southern half of Tambov province and parts of neighbouring Saratov, Voronezh and Penza. It was at this point that the Left SR activist Alexander Antonov took over the leadership of the revolt, building it up by the end of 1920 into what Lenin himself later acknowledged was the greatest threat his regime had ever had to face.39

Soviet propaganda portrayed the peasant rebels as ‘kulaks’. But the evidence suggests on the contrary that these were general peasant revolts. The rebel armies were basically made up of ordinary peasants, as suggested by their agricultural weapons — pitchforks, axes, pikes and hoes — although deserters from the civil war armies also joined their ranks and often played a leading role. In Tambov province there were 110,000 deserters, 60,000 of them in the woodland districts around Kirsanov, on the eve of the revolt. Many of the rebels were destitute youths — mostly under the age of twenty-five. Popov’s peasant army in Saratov province was described as ‘dressed in rags’, although some wore stolen suits. The bands of the Orenburg steppe were, in the words of the Buguruslan Party, made up of:

people who have been completely displaced through poverty and hunger. The kulaks help the bandits materially but themselves take up arms only very rarely indeed. The bands find it very easy to enlist supporters. The slogan ‘Kill the Communists! Smash the Collective Farms!’ is very popular among the most backward and downtrodden strata of the peasantry.

Inevitably, given the general breakdown of order, criminal elements also attached themselves to the peasant armies, looting property and raping women, a factor which later helped the Bolsheviks to divide the rebels from the local population.40

The strength of the rebel armies derived from their close ties with the village: this enabled them to carry out the guerrilla-type operations which so confounded the Red Army commanders. What the Americans later learned in Vietnam — that conventional armies, however well armed, are ill-equipped to fight a well-supported peasant army — the Russians discovered in 1921 (and rediscovered sixty years later in Afghanistan). The rebel armies were organized on a partisan basis with each village responsible for mobilizing, feeding and equipping its own troops. In Tambov and parts of western Siberia the STKs, which were closely connected to the village communes, performed these functions. Elsewhere it was the communes themselves. The Church and the local SRs, especially those on the left of the party, also helped to organize the revolt in some regions, although the precise role of the SR leadership is still clouded in mystery.41

With the support of the local population the rebel armies were, in the words of Antonov-Ovseenko, ‘scarcely vulnerable, extraordinarily invisible, and so to speak ubiquitous’. Peasants could become soldiers, and soldiers peasants, at a moment’s notice. The villagers were the ears and eyes of the rebel armies — women, children, even beggars served as spies — and everywhere the Reds were vulnerable to ambush. Yet the rebels, when pursued by the Reds, would suddenly vanish — either by merging with the local population, or with fresh horses supplied by the peasants which far outstripped the pursuing Reds. Where the Reds could travel thirty miles a day the rebels could travel up to a hundred miles. Their intimate knowledge of the local terrain, moreover, enabled them to move around and launch assaults at night. This supreme mobility easily compensated for their lack of artillery. They literally ran circles around the Reds, whose commanders complained they were ‘everywhere’. Instead of engaging the Reds in the open, the rebels stuck to the remote hills and forests waiting for the right moment to launch a surprise attack before retreating out of sight. Their strategy was purely defensive: they aimed not to march on Moscow — nor even for the most part to attack the local towns — but to cut themselves off from its influence. They blew up bridges, cut down telegraph poles and pulled up railway tracks to paralyse the Reds. It was difficult to cope with such tactics, especially since none of the Red commanders had ever come across anything like them before. The first small units sent to fight the rebels were nearly all defeated — Tukhachevsky said their ‘only purpose was to arm the rebels’ — and they soon became demoralized. Many Reds even joined the rebels.42

The aims and ideology of the revolts were strikingly uniform and reflect the common aspirations of the peasant revolution throughout Russia and the Ukraine. All the revolts sought to re-establish the peasant self-rule of 1917–18. Most expressed this in the slogan ‘Soviet Power without the Communists!’ or some variation on this theme. The same basic idea was sometimes expressed in the rather confused slogans: ‘Long Live Lenin! Down with Trotsky!’ or ‘Long Live the Bolsheviks! Death to the Communists!’ Many peasants were under the illusion that the Bolsheviks and the Communists were two separate parties: the party’s change of name in February 1918 had yet to be communicated to the remote villages. The peasants believed that ‘Lenin’ and the ‘Bolsheviks’ had brought them peace, that they had allowed them to seize the gentry’s land, to sell their foodstuffs freely on the market and to regulate their local communities through their own elected Soviets. On the other hand, they believed that ‘Trotsky’ and the ‘Communists’ had brought civil war, had taken away the gentry’s land and used it for collective farms, had stamped out free trade with requisitioning and had usurped their local Soviets.

Through the slogan of Soviet power, the peasant rebels were no doubt partly seeking to give their protest a ‘legitimate’ form. They sometimes called their rebel organs ‘Soviets’. None the less, their commitment to the democratic ideal of the revolution was no less genuine for this pretence. All the peasant movements were hostile to the Whites — and it was significant that none of them really took off until after the Whites’ defeat. Many of the rebel leaders (e.g. Makhno, Sapozhkov, Mironov, Serov, Vakhulin, Maslakov and Kolesov) had fought with the Reds, and often with distinction, against the Whites. Others had served as Soviet officials. Antonov had been the Soviet Chief of Police in the Kirsanov district until the summer of 1918, when, like the rest of the Left SRs, he had broken with the Bolsheviks and turned the district into a bastion of revolt. Sapozhkov, who led a rebel peasant army in the Novouzensk district of Samara during the summer of 1920, had formerly been the Chairman of the Novouzensk Soviet, a hero of its defence against the Cossacks and a leader of the Bolshevik underground in Samara against the Komuch. Piatakov, a peasant rebel leader in the neighbouring Saratov province, had been a Soviet provisions commissar. Voronovich, one of the rebel leaders in the Caucasus, had been the Chairman of the Luga Soviet in 1917. He had even taken part in the defence of Petrograd against Kornilov.43

The peasants often called their revolts a ‘revolution’ — and that is just what they aimed to be. As in 1917, much of the rural state infrastructure was swept aside by a huge tidal wave of peasant anger and destruction. This was a savage war of vengeance against the Communist regime. Thousands of Bolsheviks were brutally murdered. Many were the victims of gruesome (and symbolic) tortures: ears, tongues and eyes were cut out; limbs, heads and genitals were cut off; stomachs were sliced open and stuffed with wheat; crosses were branded on foreheads and torsos; Communists were nailed to trees, burned alive, drowned under ice, buried up to their necks and eaten by dogs or rats, while crowds of peasants watched and shouted. Party and Soviet offices were ransacked. Police stations and rural courts were burned to the ground. Soviet schools and propaganda centres were vandalized. As for the collective farms, the vast majority of them were destroyed and their tools and livestock redistributed among the local peasants. The same thing happened to the Soviet grain-collecting stations, mills, distilleries, beer factories and bread shops. Once the rebel forces had seized the installation ‘huge crowds of peasants’ would follow in their wake removing piecemeal the requisitioned grain and carting it back to their villages. This reclamation of the ‘people’s property’ — in effect a new ‘looting of the looters’ — helped the rebel armies to consolidate the support of the local population. But not all the rebels were such Robin Hoods. Simple banditry also played a role. Most of the rebel armies held up trains. In the Donbass region such holdups were said to be ‘almost a daily occurrence’ during the spring of 1921. Raids on local towns, and sometimes the peasant farmers, were another common source of provisions. The appearance of these rebel forces, with their vast herds of stolen livestock and their long caravans of military hardware, liquor barrels and bags of grain must have been very colourful. Antonov’s partisans made off from Kniazeva in the Serdobsk district with the entire contents of the costumes and props department of the local theatre, complete with magic lanterns, dummies and bustles. One eye-witness described Popov’s rebel army in the Volga town of Khvalynsk as a long train of machine-gun carriers each drawn by six horses:

the carriers were covered with bloodstains and the horses were decorated with brightly coloured ribbons and material. Ten of the carriers also bore gramophones, while others carried barrels of beer and vodka. All day long the bandits sang and danced to the music and the town was taken over by an unimaginable din.44

By March 1921 Soviet power in much of the countryside had virtually ceased to exist. Provincial Bolshevik organizations sent desperate telegrams to Moscow claiming they were powerless to resist the rebels and calling for immediate reinforcements. The consignment of grain to the cities had been brought to a virtual halt within the rebel strongholds. As the urban food crisis deepened and more and more workers went on strike, it became clear that the Bolsheviks were facing a revolutionary situation. Lenin was thrown into panic: every day he bombarded the local Red commanders with violent demands for the swiftest possible suppression of the revolts by whatever means. ‘We are barely holding on,’ he acknowledged in March. The peasant wars, he told the opening session of the Tenth Party Congress on 8 March, were ‘far more dangerous than all the Denikins, Yudeniches and Kolchaks put together’.45 Together with the strikes and the Kronstadt mutiny of March, they would force that Congress to abandon finally the widely hated policies of War Communism and restore free trade under the NEP. It was a desperate bid to stem the tide of this popular revolution. Having defeated the Whites, who were backed by no fewer than eight Western powers, the Bolsheviks surrendered to the peasantry.

*

The wave of workers’ strikes that swept across Russia during February 1921 was no less revolutionary than the peasant revolts. Given the punishments which strikers could expect (instant dismissal, arrest and imprisonment, even execution), it was a brave act, an act of defiance, to stage a strike in 1921. Whereas earlier strikes had been a means of bargaining with the regime, those of 1921 were a last desperate bid to overthrow it.

‘Workers, you have nothing to lose but your chains!’ Marx’s dictum had never been more true. The militarized factory had enserfed the working class. Lacking enough foodstuffs to stimulate the workers, the Bolsheviks depended on coercion alone. Workers were deprived of their meagre rations, imprisoned, even shot, if their factories failed to meet the set production quotas. With the poor harvest and the growing reluctance of the peasantry to relinquish their grain, food stocks in the cities shrank to dangerously low levels during the winter of 1920–1. The disruption of transport by heavy snows made the situation worse. On 22 January the bread ration was cut by one-third in several industrial cities, including Moscow and Petrograd. Even the most privileged workers were given only 1,000 calories a day. Hundreds of factories across the country were forced to close their gates for lack of fuel. The Menshevik Fedor Dan saw starving workers and soldiers begging for food in the streets of Petrograd. Women queued overnight to buy a loaf of bread.46 It was reminiscent of the situation on the eve of the February Revolution.

Moscow was the first to erupt. A rash of workers’ meetings called for an end to the Communists’ privileges, the restoration of free trade and movement (meaning their right to travel into the countryside and barter with the peasants), civil liberties and the Constituent Assembly. White flags were hung in the factories as a traditional mark of working-class protest. The Moscow printers took the lead: they had staged a similar protest in May 1920 and both the Mensheviks and SRs were strong within their union. But such was the general level of discontent that the protest movement needed little encouragement. The Bolsheviks sent emissaries to the factories to try to defuse the situation; but they were rudely heckled. According to one (rather questionable) report, Lenin himself appeared before a noisy meeting of metalworkers and asked his listeners, who had accused him of ruining the country, whether they would prefer to have the Whites. But his question drew an angry response: ‘Let come who may — whites, blacks or devils — just you clear out.’ By 21 February thousands of workers were out on strike. Huge demonstrations marched through the streets of the Khamovniki district and, after attempts to disperse the crowds had failed, troops were ordered in. But, as in February 1917, the soldiers refused to fire on the crowds and special Communist detachments (ChON) had to be called in which killed several workers. The next day even bigger crowds appeared on the streets. They marched on the Khamovniki barracks and tried to get the soldiers out; but the soldiers were now locked inside and Communist detachments once again dispersed the crowds by force. On 23 February, as 10,000 workers marched in protest through the streets, martial law was declared in the capital.47

Meanwhile, the strikes spread to Petrograd. Numerous factories held protest rallies on the 22nd. As in Moscow, the workers called for an end to the privileged rations of the Communists, the restoration of free trade and movement, and, under the influence of the Mensheviks and SRs, free reelections to the Soviets and the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. Over the next three days thousands of workers came out on strike. All the biggest metal plants — the Putilov, Trubochny, Baltic and Obukhovsky — joined the movement, along with most of the docks and shipyards. It was practically a general strike. On the Nevsky Prospekt and Vasilevsky Island there were clashes between strikers and troops. Some of the soldiers fired on the workers, killing and wounding at least thirty, but several thousand soldiers, including the Izmailovsky and Finland Regiments, went over to the crowd. Even the sailors of the Aurora, that floating symbol of Bolshevik power, docked in the city for winter repairs, disembarked to join the demonstrations.

It did not take a genius to realize that this was exactly the same situation that, four years before to the day, had sparked the mutiny of the Petrograd garrison which led to the downfall of the tsarist regime. The Bolsheviks were petrified of another mutiny and did everything they could to keep the soldiers in their barracks. They even took away their shoes, on the pretext of replacing them with new ones, to stop the soldiers going out. The city was placed under martial law on the 25th. All power was vested in a special Committee of Defence with Zinoviev at its head. The party boss, who was always inclined to panic in such situations, made a hysterical appeal to the workers, begging them to return to work and promising to improve their economic situation. Meanwhile the Cheka was arresting hundreds of strikers — together with most of the leading Mensheviks and SRs in the city — while thousands of others were locked out of their factories and thus deprived of their rations. All of which was bound to exacerbate the strikes. The workers now called openly for the overthrow of the Bolshevik regime. On 27 February, the fourth anniversary of the revolution, the following proclamation appeared in the streets. It was a call for a new revolution:

First of all the workers and peasants need freedom. They do not want to live by the decrees of the Bolsheviks. They want to control their own destinies.

We demand the liberation of all arrested socialists and non-party working men; abolition of martial law; freedom of speech, press, and assembly for all who labour; free elections of factory committees, trade unions and soviets.

Call meetings, pass resolutions, send delegates to the authorities, bring about the realization of your demands.48

That same day the revolt spread across the Gulf of Finland to the Kronstadt naval base: a real revolution now moved one step closer. In 1917 Trotsky had called the Kronstadt sailors the ‘pride and glory of the Russian revolution’.fn6 They were the first to call for Soviet power, and they played a key role in the events of October. Yet Kronstadt had always been a troublesome bastion of revolutionary maximalism. Its sailors were Anarchist as much as Bolshevik. What they really wanted was an independent Kronstadt Soviet Republic — a sort of island version of the Paris Commune — as opposed to a centralized state. Until the summer of 1918 the Kronstadt Soviet was governed by a broad coalition of all the far-left parties. Its executive was chosen for its competence rather than its party, and was strictly accountable to the elected Soviets (or ‘toiling collectives’) on the naval base. Such democracy was intolerable to the Bolsheviks. They purged the Soviet of all the other parties and turned it into a bureaucratic organ of their state. The sailors soon became disgruntled. Although they fought for the Reds during the defence of Petrograd, in October 1919, they only did so to defeat the Whites, whom they saw as an even greater evil than the Bolsheviks. Once the civil war was over the sailors turned their anger on the Reds. They condemned their treatment of the peasantry. Many of the Kronstadt sailors came from the countryside — the Ukraine and Tambov were especially well represented — and were shocked by what they found there when they returned home on leave. ‘Ours is an ordinary peasant farm,’ wrote one of the Petropavlovsk crew in November 1920 after learning that his family’s cow had been requisitioned; ‘yet when I and my brother return home from serving the Soviet republic people will sneer at our wrecked farm and say: “What did you serve for? What has the Soviet republic given you?” ’ The feudal lifestyle of the Communist bosses was another source of mounting resentment among both the sailors and the party rank and file. Raskolnikov, the Kronstadt Bolshevik leader of 1917, returned to the base in 1920 as the newly appointed Chief Commander of the Baltic Fleet and lived there like a lord with his elegant wife, the Bolshevik commissar Larissa Reissner, complete with banquets, chauffeured cars and servants. Reissner even had a wardrobe of dresses requisitioned for her from the aristocracy. Half the Kronstadt Bolsheviks became so disillusioned that they tore up their party cards during the second half of 1920.49

When news of the strikes in Petrograd reached the Kronstadt sailors they sent a delegation to the city to report on their development. When they returned, on 28 February, the crew of the Petropavlovsk, previously a Bolshevik stronghold, raised their own banner of revolt with a proclamation calling for free Soviet elections, freedom of speech, press and assembly (albeit only for the workers and peasants, the leftwing parties and the trade unions), ‘equal rations for all the working people’, and ‘freedom for the peasants to toil the land as they see fit’ provided they did not use hired labour. Whereas the workers’ resolutions called for the reconvocation of the Constituent Assembly, the sailors remained opposed to this. It had been an Anarchist group of Kronstadt sailors who had forcibly closed down the Constituent Assembly in January 1918. Their programme remained strictly Soviet in the sense that they aimed to restore their own multi-party Soviet of 1918. Moreover, unlike the peasant rebels, whose slogan was ‘Soviets without the Communists!’, they were even prepared to accept the Bolsheviks in this coalition provided they accepted the principles of Soviet democracy and renounced their dictatorship. This helps to explain why — uniquely among the revolts of 1921 — more than half the Bolshevik rank and file in Kronstadt chose to join the mutiny.

Embarrassed by the loss of this former stronghold, the Bolsheviks tried to claim that the Kronstadt rebels were not the same as those of 1917, that the best proletarian sailors had been lost in the civil war and replaced by ‘peasant lads in sailors’ suits’ who brought with them from their village ‘anarchist’ and ‘petty-bourgeois’ attitudes. Yet, as Israel Getzler has shown, this was in fact a case of the Bolsheviks being abandoned by their own most favoured sons. The Kronstadt rebels of 1921 were essentially the same as those of 1917. The majority of their leaders were veteran sailors of the Kronstadt Fleet. Some of them, such as the SR-Maximalist Anatolii Lamanov, chief ideologist of the mutiny, had been prominent members of the Kronstadt Soviet in 1917–18. On the two major ships involved in the mutiny, the Petropavlovsk and the Sevastopol, 94 per cent of the crew had been recruited before 1918.50 In its personnel, as in its ideology, the mutiny was a return to the revolutionary days of 1917.

Revolutionary anger and excitement spilled on to the streets on 1 March. A mass meeting in Anchor Square attended by 15,000 people, nearly one-third of the Kronstadt population, passed a resolution calling for the Soviet to be reelected. Kalinin, sent to calm the sailors, was rudely heckled, while Kuzmin, a Bolshevik commissar of the fleet, was booed off the stage. The next day 300 delegates from the various ships and shipyards met to elect a new Soviet. The mutinous Bolsheviks made up a large minority of the delegates. Alarmed by rumours that Communist guards were about to storm the meeting, the delegates chose instead to select a five-man Revolutionary Committee, which hurriedly set about organizing the island’s defence. The old spirit of revolutionary improvisation had returned.

Although these rumours turned out to be false, the Bolsheviks in Petrograd were indeed preparing to suppress the mutiny. They could not wait for it to peter out. Revolts in other cities, such as Kazan and Nizhnyi Novgorod, were already being inspired by it. The ice-packed Gulf of Finland, moreover, was about to thaw and this would make the fortress, with the whole of its fleet freed from the ice, virtually impregnable. On 2 March martial law was imposed on the whole of Petrograd province. Troops and artillery were amassed along the coastline opposite Kronstadt. As in the defence of Petrograd against the Whites, Trotsky was despatched to the old capital to take command of operations. He arrived on 5 March and ordered the mutineers to surrender at once. In an ultimatum that could have been issued by a nineteenth-century provincial governor to the rebellious peasants he warned that the rebels would ‘be shot like partridges’ if they did not give up in twenty-four hours. Trotsky ordered the families of the sailors living in Petrograd to be arrested as hostages. When the head of the Petrograd Cheka insisted that the mutiny was ‘spontaneous’, Trotsky cabled Moscow to have him dismissed.51

The assault began on 7 March. For a whole day the Bolsheviks’ heavy guns bombarded the fortress from the north-western coast. It was Women Workers’ Day and amidst the noise of the exploding shells the Kronstadt radio sent out greetings to the women of the world. The distant thunder of heavy guns could be heard by Alexander Berkman twenty miles away on Nevsky Prospekt. The American Anarchist, whose faith in the revolution had been suddenly revived by the mutiny, noted in his diary at 6 p.m. that day: ‘Kronstadt has been attacked! Days of anguish and cannonading. My heart is numb with despair; something has died within me.’ The aim of the shelling was to ‘soften’ up the fortress in preparation for an assault across the ice. The troops would have to run across a terrifying five-mile stretch of ice exposed to the guns of the Kronstadt boats and forts. Morale was understandably low among the conscript troops and Tukhachevsky, who was put in charge of the operation, had to place special Communist security troops among their units and Cheka machine-guns behind their backs to make sure they did not run away. They moved forward early the next morning: a snowstorm provided them with cover and some of the forward troops were given white sheets. The assault, however, ended in disaster. The heavy guns of the mutineers made channels of water in the ice into which many of the assaulting troops, blinded by the snowstorm, fell and drowned. Two thousand soldiers were mown down by machine-guns from the outer forts. When the snowstorm lifted the huge expanse of ice was revealed to be littered with corpses.52

Meanwhile, amidst all this fighting, the mutineers began to carry out their ‘revolution’. This was a republic built under fire. In its hectic eighteen days of rule (1–18 March) the Kronstadt Revolutionary Committee dismantled the Communist apparatus, organized the reelections of the trade unions and prepared for Soviet reelections. On 8 March its own Izvestiia published a statement of ‘What we are fighting for’. It was a moving document of protest that summed up for the sailors — and indeed for the Russian people as a whole — what had gone wrong with the revolution:

By carrying out the October Revolution the working class had hoped to achieve its emancipation. But the result has been an even greater enslavement of human beings. The power of the monarchy, with its police and its gendarmerie, has passed into the hands of the Communist usurpers, who have given the people not freedom but the constant fear of torture by the Cheka, the horrors of which far exceed the rule of the gendarmerie under tsarism … The glorious emblem of the toilers’ state — the sickle and the hammer — has in fact been replaced by the Communists with the bayonet and the barred window, which they use to maintain the calm and carefree life of the new bureaucracy, the Communist commissars and functionaries.

But the worst and most criminal of all is the moral servitude which the Communists have also introduced: they have laid their hands on the inner world of the toiling people, forcing them to think in the way that they want. Through the state control of the trade unions they have chained the workers to their machines so that labour is no longer a source of joy but a new form of slavery. To the protests of the peasants, expressed in spontaneous uprisings, and those of the workers, whose living conditions have compelled them to strike, they have answered with mass executions and a bloodletting that exceeds even the tsarist generals. The Russia of the toilers, the first to raise the red banner of liberation, is drenched in blood.53

This was the context in which the Tenth Party Congress assembled in Moscow on 8 March. Two critical problems confronted the leadership: the defeat of the Workers’ Opposition — and to a lesser extent the Democratic Centralists — with their two dissident resolutions on the trade unions and party democracy; and the resolution of the revolutionary crisis in the country.

Lenin, as always in such situations, was in a rage. He would stop at nothing to ensure the defeat of the Workers’ Opposition. Kollontai was targeted for personal abuse. Lenin would not speak to her and threatened those who did. During the debates he used the fact that Shliapnikov and Kollontai were known to have been lovers to ridicule their arguments for proletarian solidarity. ‘Well, thank God,’ he said to general laughter, ‘we know that Comrade Kollontai and Comrade Shliapnikov are a “class united”.’ To sly sarcasm Lenin added slander, condemning the Workers’ Opposition as a ‘syndicalist deviation’ and accusing it of sharing the same ideals as the Kronstadt mutiny and the workers’ strikes. This was of course false: whereas both groups of protesters were demanding the overthrow of the Bolshevik dictatorship, the Workers’ Opposition merely wanted to reform it. But such distinctions were harder to make than they were to blur. In the atmosphere of hysterical panic — which Lenin helped to create at the Congress with his constant warnings that Soviet power could be overthrown at any moment — the Bolshevik delegates were much too frightened to question Lenin’s charge. They accepted his demagogic line that strict party unity was called for at this moment and that to tolerate such opposition factions could only benefit the enemy. No doubt, if it had come to a vote, Lenin’s position on the trade union question would have received a substantial majority in any case. The ‘Platform of Ten’, as it was known, offered a welcome compromise between Trotsky’s supercentralism and the ‘syndicalism’ of the Workers’ Opposition, effectively restoring the position of the Ninth Party Congress whereby the state would continue to run industry through the system of One-Man Management and consult the unions on managerial appointments. But Lenin’s tactics made victory sure. His two resolutions condemning the Workers’ Opposition received massive majorities, with no more than thirty of the 694 Congress delegates voting against them.54

Lenin now consolidated his victory with one of the most fateful decisions in the history of the Communist Party — the ban on factions. This secret resolution, passed by the Congress on 16 March, outlawed the formation of all party groupings independent of the Central Committee. By a two-thirds vote of the Central Committee and the Control Commission such factions could be excluded from the party. The ban had been proposed by Lenin in a moment of vindictive anger against the Workers’ Opposition. It was passed by a Congress which had clearly become bored and impatient with the factional squabbles of the past few months, and which in the present crisis was only too eager to rally round its leader against his opponents in the party. Neither Lenin nor the rank and file fully realized the ban’s potential significance. Henceforth, the Central Committee was to rule the party on the same dictatorial lines as the party ruled the country; no one could challenge its decisions without exposing themselves to the charge of factionalism. Stalin’s rise to power was a product of the ban. He used the same tactics against Trotsky and Bukharin as Lenin had used against the Workers’ Opposition. Indeed it was mainly to enforce the ban and carry out the purge of the Workers’ Opposition that Lenin created the office of a General Secretary of the Party, with Stalin as the first ‘Gensek’, in April 1922. By the Twelfth Party Congress of 1923 that purge was accomplished — as was Stalin’s ascendancy in the Central Committee. Shliapnikov and Kollontai, though spared the ignominy of expulsion from the party, were both sent into diplomatic exile — the former to Paris, the latter to Stockholm. Supporters of the Workers’ Opposition were removed from their party and trade union posts. Most of them were harassed, some imprisoned, nearly all of them were later shot in Stalin’s terror. Shliapnikov was murdered in 1937.

No less monumental than the ban on factions was the second historic resolution of the Tenth Party Congress, the replacement of food requisitioning by the tax in kind. This abandoned the central plank of War Communism and laid the foundations of the NEP by allowing the peasants, once the tax had been paid, to sell the rest of their surplus as they liked, including through the free market. It was a clear attempt to stimulate production: the overall burden of the tax was 45 per cent lower than the levy of 1920 (it was later reduced to a standard rate of 10 per cent of the harvest); there were tax rebates for peasants who increased their sowings and productivity; the individual peasant was made responsible for his own share of the tax, thus abolishing the collective responsibility of the commune; and there was to be a special fund of consumer goods and agricultural tools for exchange with the most productive peasants. Lenin, it seems, had been moving towards this ‘new deal’ with the peasants for several weeks. A report on the Antonov uprising, delivered by Bukharin to the Politburo on 2 February after his return from a trip to Tambov, had made it clear that it was impossible to continue with the requisitionings in view of the strength of the peasantry’s resistance to them there and in many other provinces. There can be no doubt that the timing of the introduction of the tax in kind was determined by the urgent need to pacify these peasant wars, which Lenin feared more than the Whites.55

Fearful that the delegates would denounce the tax as a restoration of capitalism, Lenin attempted to limit its discussion by delaying the introduction of the resolution until 15 March, the penultimate day of the Congress, by which time many of the delegates had already left for the Kronstadt Front. Lenin’s own lecture on the NEP monopolized the session, leaving little time for any other speakers. He stressed that the tax in kind was desperately needed to quell the peasant revolts and to build a new alliance — the smychka — with the peasants, based on the market. Soviet power could not survive without it, since the failure of the revolution in the West left the proletariat without other allies. The policies of the civil war had been a utopian dream — it was impossible to create socialism by administrative fiat — and in a backward peasant country such as Russia there was no other way to restore the economy after the devastations of the past few years, let alone to accumulate the capital for the socialist transformation of the country, than through the market. He dismissed fears that restoring private trade would lead Russia back to capitalism: this was to be a socialized market. The capitalist classes in Russia, including the ‘kulaks’, had already been destroyed by the revolution. And as long as it controlled the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy, banking, heavy industry, transport and foreign trade, then the state could regulate the market and use fiscal pressures to encourage the smallholders towards the collective farms and co-operatives. Lenin’s tactics clearly worked. His speech had lasted for nearly three hours and by the time he sat down most of the delegates were either too weary or too intimidated to engage in serious theoretical debate. Whereas on other issues there were up to 250 different speakers, there were only four, other than Lenin himself, on the tax in kind. All of them were chosen by the presidium, were strictly limited to ten minutes each, and none had any serious criticisms to make. Neither Trotsky nor Bukharin expressed a desire to speak on the new tax, although both had espoused contrary policies up until that time, and between them had spoken on no fewer than fourteen occasions during the other sessions of the Congress. Even Shliapnikov, who later condemned the tax as a retreat before the peasantry, remained strangely silent after his bruising of the past few days.56 The defining policy of the 1920s was passed virtually without discussion. The era of the stage-managed Party Congress had arrived.

Meanwhile the Bolsheviks focused their attention on the suppression of the popular revolts. On 10 March 300 delegates at the Tenth Party Congress volunteered to fight on the Kronstadt Front after hearing Trotsky’s bleak description of the situation there. Eager to prove their loyalty, members of the Workers’ Opposition were among the first to step forward. The delegates arrived in Petrograd the following day bringing news with them of the coming tax in kind to boost the morale of the troops. By this stage, the strikes in Petrograd had petered out: arrests and concessions — including a promise by Zinoviev as early as 27 February that free trade was about to be restored — proved enough to break them. Moscow’s strikes followed the same pattern. On 16 March the final assault on the Kronstadt fortress commenced. After several days of heavy artillery shelling from the coast and bombing from the air, 50,000 crack troops advanced across the ice in the dark hours of early morning. The battle raged for eighteen hours. But by midnight on the 17th the rebellion had been defeated and most of the sailors had surrendered. Over 10,000 Red troops were killed, including fifteen delegates of the Tenth Party Congress who had joined in the assault. When the battle was over the government in Helsingfors requested Moscow to have all the corpses cleared away lest they should be washed up on the Finnish coast and create a health hazard following the thaw.

The next morning hundreds of prisoners from the Kronstadt base were marched through Petrograd on their route to prison. Near the centre they saw a group of workers carrying sacks of potatoes on their backs. ‘Traitors!’ the sailors shouted, ‘you have sold our lives for Communist potatoes. Tomorrow you will have our flesh to eat with your potatoes.’ Later that night some 500 rebels were shot without trial on Zinoviev’s orders: the regular executioners refused to do it, so a brigade of teenage Komsomols was ordered to shoot the sailors instead. Some of the rebels managed to flee to Gorky’s flat and tell him of these executions. Gorky was outraged — like many socialists he had supported the rebellion from the start — and at once called Lenin to complain. The Bolshevik leader ordered Zinoviev to explain his actions before a party meeting in Gorky’s flat. But at the meeting Zinoviev promptly had a heart attack (Gorky later claimed that it was faked) and the result was that he was only lightly reprimanded for an action which, in any case, Lenin had probably approved. During the following months 2,000 more rebels were executed, nearly all of them without trial, while hundreds of others were sent on Lenin’s orders to Solovki, the first big Soviet concentration camp on an island in the White Sea, where they died a slower death from hunger, illness and exhaustion. About 8,000 Kronstadt rebels escaped across the ice to Finland, where they were interned and put to public works. Some of them were later lured back to Russia by the promise of an amnesty — only to be shot or sent to concentration camps on their return.57

The suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion had a shattering effect on socialists throughout the world. There could not be a more conclusive proof that the Bolsheviks had turned into tyrants. Alexander Berkman, with ‘the last thread of his faith in the Bolsheviks broken’, wandered in despair through the streets of Petrograd — the city where the revolution had been born and where it had now died. On 18 March he noted with bitter irony in his diary: ‘The victors are celebrating the anniversary of the Commune of 1871. Trotsky and Zinoviev denounce Thiers and Gallifet for the slaughter of the Paris rebels.’58

Military might and ruthless terror also held the key to the suppression of the major peasant revolts, although in some places such as the Volga region famine and exhaustion did the job instead. The turning point came in the early summer, when the Bolsheviks rethought their military strategy: instead of sending in small detachments to fight the rebels they swamped the rebel areas with troops and unleashed a campaign of mass terror against those villages that supported the rebels whilst trying to ween away the others through propaganda. The new strategy was first applied in Tambov province, where Tukhachevsky, fresh from his success against Kronstadt, was sent in April to crush the Antonov revolt. By the height of the operation in June the insurgent areas were occupied by a force of over 100,000 men, most of them crack troops from the élite Communist security units and the Komsomol, together with several hundred heavy guns and armoured cars. Aeroplanes were used to track the movement of the bands and to drop bombs and propaganda on to their strongholds. Poison gas was also used to ‘smoke the bands out of the forests’. Through paid informers, the rebels and their families were singled out for arrest as hostages and imprisoned in specially constructed concentration camps: by the end of June there were 50,000 peasants in the Tambov camps, including over 1,000 children. It was not unusual for whole village populations to be interned and later shot or deported to the Arctic Circle if the rebels did not surrender. Sometimes the rebel villages were simply burned to the ground. In just one volost of the Tambov district — and it was not even particularly noted as a rebel stronghold — 154 peasants were shot, 227 families were taken hostage, 17 houses were burned down and 46 were torn down or transferred to informers. Overall, it has been estimated that 100,000 people were imprisoned or deported and 15,000 people shot during the suppression of the revolt.59

Along with the big stick there was also a small carrot to induce the peasants to abandon their support for the rebels. Villages that passed a resolution condemning the ‘bandits’ were rewarded from a special fund of salt and manufactured goods. The Bolsheviks were counting on the rebels, once they heard of these resolutions, to take reprisals against the treacherous villages so that they could drive a wedge between them and undermine the rebels’ social base. There was also an amnesty for the rebels, although those who were foolish enough to surrender, about 6,000 in all, were nearly all imprisoned or shot. Finally, there was a barrage of propaganda about the benefits of the NEP, although its rather questionable efficacy hardly warrants the claims later made for it by the Bolsheviks. Many peasants, even in the Moscow region, had never heard of the tax in kind, while most of those who had, as Tukhachevsky acknowledged at the time, were ‘definitely not inclined to believe in the sincerity of the decree’.60

By the late summer of 1921, when much of the countryside was struck down with famine, most of the peasant revolts had been defeated in the military sense. Antonov’s army was destroyed in June, although he escaped and with smaller guerrilla forces continued to make life difficult for the Soviet regime in the Tambov countryside until the following summer, when he was finally hunted down and killed by the Cheka. In western Siberia, the Don and the Kuban all but the smallest peasant bands had been destroyed by the end of July, although peasant resistance to the Soviet regime continued on a smaller scale — and in more passive ways — until 1923. As for Makhno, he gave up the struggle in August 1921 and fled with his last remaining followers to Romania, although his strongholds in the south-east Ukraine continued to be a rebellious region for several years to come. To many Ukrainians Makhno remained a folk-hero (songs were sung about him at weddings and parties even as late as the 1950s) but to others he was a bogey man. ‘Batko Makhno will get you if you don’t sleep,’ Soviet mothers told their children.61

The Mensheviks and SRs were suppressed along with the rebels. It was axiomatic to Bolshevik propaganda that the peasant revolts and workers’ strikes had been organized by these parties. It was certainly true that they had sympathized with them, and in some cases had even supported them. But much more relevant was the fact that, as the popularity of the Bolsheviks had plummeted, so that of the SRs and Mensheviks had grown: they were a threat to the regime. By claiming that the SRs and Mensheviks had organized the strikes and revolts of 1921, the Bolsheviks sought both a pretext to destroy their last political rivals and an explanation for the protests that denied their popular base. The arrest of the ‘counter-revolutionary’ Mensheviks, some 5,000 in all, during 1921, and the grotesque show trial of the SR leaders the following year, when the whole party was in effect convicted as ‘enemies of the people’,62 were last desperate measures by the Bolsheviks to claim a popular legitimacy for their bankrupt revolution.

*

The New Economic Policy was originally conceived as a temporary retreat. ‘We are making economic concessions in order to avoid political ones,’ Bukharin told the Comintern in July. ‘The NEP is only a temporary deviation, a tactical retreat, a clearing of the land for a new and decisive attack of labour against the front of international capitalism,’ Zinoviev added in December. Lenin also saw it in these terms. The NEP was ‘a peasant Brest-Litovsk’, taking one step backwards to take two steps forward. But, unlike many of the other party leaders, Lenin accepted that the period of retreat was likely to be long enough — he talked vaguely of ‘not less than a decade and probably more’ — to constitute not just a tactical ploy but a whole recasting of the revolution. The NEP, he reminded the party in May, was to be adopted ‘ “seriously and for a long time” — we must definitely get this into our heads and remember it well, because rumours are spreading that this is a policy only in quotes, in other words a form of political trickery that is only being carried out for the moment. This is not true.’63

As Lenin saw it, the NEP was more than a temporary concession to the market in order to get the country back on its feet. It was a fundamental if rather ill-formulated effort to redefine the role of socialism in a backward peasant country where, largely as a result of his own party’s coup d’étât in 1917, the ‘bourgeois revolution’ had not been completed. Only ‘in countries of developed capitalism’ was it possible to make an ‘immediate transition to socialism’, Lenin had told the Tenth Party Congress. Soviet Russia was thus confronted with the task of ‘building communism with bourgeois hands’, of basing socialism on the market. Lenin of course remained full of doubts: at times he expressed fears that the regime would be drowned in a sea of petty peasant capitalism. But in the main he saw the market — regulated by the state and gradually socialized through co-operatives — as the only way to socialism. Whereas the Bolsheviks up till now had lived by the maxim ‘The less market the more socialism’, Lenin was moving towards the slogan ‘The more market the more socialism’.64

But, like the leopard with its spots, the Bolsheviks could not easily erase their innate mistrust of private trade. Even Bukharin, who later became the main defender of the NEP, warmed to it only slowly during the course of 1921–3. Many of the rank-and-file Bolsheviks, in particular, saw the boom in private trade as a betrayal of the revolution. What, only months ago, had been condemned as a crime against the revolution was now being endorsed and encouraged. Moreover, once the doors had been opened to the market it was difficult to stop the flood of private trade that was almost bound to follow after the shortages of the previous four years. By 1921 the whole population was living in patched-up clothes and shoes, cooking with broken kitchen utensils, drinking from cracked cups. Everyone needed something new. People set up stalls in the streets to sell or exchange their basic household goods, much as they do today in most of Russia’s cities; flea-markets boomed; while ‘bagging’ to and from the countryside once again became a mass phenomenon. Licensed by new laws in 1921–2, private cafés, shops and restaurants, night clubs and brothels, hospitals and clinics, credit and saving associations, even small-scale manufacturers sprang up like mushrooms after the rain. Foreign observers were amazed by the sudden transformation. Moscow and Petrograd, graveyard cities in the civil war, suddenly burst into life, with noisy traders, busy cabbies and bright shop signs filling the streets just as they had done before the revolution. ‘The NEP turned Moscow into a vast market place,’ recalled Emma Goldman:

Shops and stores sprang up overnight, mysteriously stacked with delicacies Russia had not seen for years. Large quantities of butter, cheese and meat were displayed for sale; pastry, rare fruit, and sweets of every variety were to be purchased. Men, women and children with pinched faces and hungry eyes stood about gazing into the windows and discussing the great miracle: what was but yesterday considered a heinous offence was now flaunted before them in an open and legal manner.’65

But could those hungry people afford such goods? That was the fear of the Bolshevik rank and file. It seemed to them that the boom in private trade would inevitably lead to a widening gap between rich and poor. ‘We young Communists had all grown up in the belief that money was done away with once and for all,’ recalled one Bolshevik in the 1940s. ‘If money was reappearing, wouldn’t rich people reappear too? Weren’t we on the slippery slope that led back to capitalism? We put these questions to ourselves with feelings of anxiety.’ Such doubts were strengthened by the sudden rise of unemployment in the first two years of the NEP. While these unemployed were living on the bread line the peasants were growing fat and rich. ‘Is this what we made the revolution for?’ one Bolshevik asked Emma Goldman. There was a widespread feeling among the workers, voiced most clearly by the Workers’ Opposition, that the NEP was sacrificing their class interests to the peasantry, that the ‘kulak’ was being rehabilitated and allowed to grow rich at the workers’ expense. In 1921–2 literally tens of thousands of Bolshevik workers tore up their party cards in disgust with the NEP: they dubbed it the New Exploitation of the Proletariat.66

Much of this anger was focused on the ‘Nepmen’, the new and vulgar get-rich-quickly class of private traders who thrived in Russia’s Roaring Twenties. It was perhaps unavoidable that after seven years of war and shortages these wheeler-dealers should step into the void. Witness the ‘spivs’ in Britain after 1945, or, for that matter, the so-called ‘mafias’ in post-Soviet Russia. True, the peasants were encouraged to sell their foodstuffs to the state and the co-operatives by the offer of cheap manufactured goods in return. But until the socialized system began to function properly (and that was not until the mid-1920s) it remained easier and more profitable to sell them to the ‘Nepmen’ instead. If some product was particularly scarce these profiteers were sure to have it — usually because they had bribed some Soviet official. Bootleg liquor, heroin and cocaine — they sold everything. The ‘Nepmen’ were a walking symbol of this new and ugly capitalism. They dressed their wives and mistresses in diamonds and furs, drove around in huge imported cars, snored at the opera, sang in restaurants, and boasted loudly in expensive hotel bars of the dollar fortunes they had wasted at the newly opened race-tracks and casinos. The ostentatious spending of this new and vulgar rich, shamelessly set against the background of the appalling hunger and suffering of these years, gave rise to a widespread and bitter feeling of resentment among all those common people, the workers in particular, who had thought that the revolution should be about ending such inequalities.

This profound sense of plebeian resentment — of the ‘Nepmen’, the ‘bourgeois specialists’, the ‘Jews’ and the ‘kulaks’ — remained deeply buried in the hearts of many people, especially the blue-collar workers and the party rank and file. Here was the basic emotional appeal of Stalin’s ‘revolution from above’, the forcible drive towards industrialization during the first of the Five Year Plans. It was the appeal to a second wave of class war against the ‘bourgeoisie’ of the NEP, the new ‘enemies of the people’, the idea of a return to the harsh but romantic spirit of the civil war, that ‘heroic period’ of the revolution, when the Bolsheviks, or so the legend went, had conquered every fortress and pressed ahead without fear or compromise. Russia in the 1920s remained a society at war with itself — full of unresolved social tensions and resentments just beneath the surface. In this sense, the deepest legacy of the revolution was its failure to eliminate the social inequalities that had brought it about in the first place.

16 Deaths and Departures

*

i Orphans of the Revolution

‘No, I am not well,’ Gorky wrote to Romain Rolland on his arrival in Berlin — ‘my tuberculosis has come back, but at my age it is not dangerous. Much harder to bear is the sad sickness of the soul — I feel very tired: during the past seven years in Russia I have seen and lived through so many sad dramas — the more sad for not being caused by the logic of passion and free will but by the blind and cold calculation of fanatics and cowards … I still believe fervently in the future happiness of mankind but I am sickened and disturbed by the growing sum of suffering which people have to pay as the price of their fine hopes.’1 Death and disillusionment lay behind Gorky’s departure from Russia in the autumn of 1921. So many people had been killed in the previous four years that even he could no longer hold firm to his revolutionary hopes and ideals. Nothing was worth such human suffering.

Nobody knows the full human cost of the revolution. By any calculation it was catastrophic. Counting only deaths from the civil war, the terror, famine and disease, it was something in the region of ten million people. But this excludes the emigration (about two million) and the demographic effects of a hugely reduced birth-rate — nobody wanted children in these frightful years — which statisticians say would have added up to ten million lives.fn1 The highest death rates were among adult men — in Petrograd alone there were 65,000 widows in 1920 — but death was so common that it touched everyone. Nobody lived through the revolutionary era without losing friends and relatives. ‘My God how many deaths!’ Sergei Semenov wrote to an old friend in January 1921. ‘Most of the old men — Boborykin, Linev, Vengerov, Vorontsov, etc., have died. Even Grigory Petrov has disappeared — how he died is not known, we can only say that it probably was not from joy at the progress of socialism. What hurts especially is not even knowing where one’s friends are buried.’ How death could affect a single family is well illustrated by the Tereshchenkovs. Nikitin Tereshchenkov, a Red Army doctor, lost both his daughter and his sister to the typhus epidemic in 1919; his eldest son and brother were killed on the Southern Front fighting for the Red Army in that same year; his brother-in-law was mysteriously murdered. Nikitin’s wife was dying from TB, while he himself contracted typhus. Denounced by the local Cheka (like so many of the rural intelligentsia) as ‘enemies of the people’, they lost their town house in Smolensk and were living, in 1920, on a small farm worked by their two surviving sons — Volodya, fifteen, and Misha, thirteen.2

To die in Russia in these times was easy but to be buried was very hard. Funeral services had been nationalized, so every burial took endless paperwork. Then there was the shortage of timber for coffins. Some people wrapped their loved ones up in mats, or hired coffins — marked ‘PLEASE RETURN’ — just to carry them to their graves. One old professor was too large for his hired coffin and had to be crammed in by breaking several bones. For some unaccountable reason there was even a shortage of graves — would one believe it if this was not Russia? — which left people waiting several months for one. The main morgue in Moscow had hundreds of rotting corpses in the basement awaiting burial. The Bolsheviks tried to ease the problem by promoting free cremations. In 1919 they pledged to build the biggest crematorium in the world. But the Russians’ continued attachment to the Orthodox burial rituals killed off this initiative.3

Death was so common that people became inured to it. The sight of a dead body in the street no longer attracted attention. Murders occurred for the slightest motive — stealing a few roubles, jumping a queue, or simply for the entertainment of the killers. Seven years of war had brutalized people and made them insensitive to the pain and suffering of others. In 1921 Gorky asked a group of soldiers from the Red Army if they were uneasy about killing people. ‘No they were not. “He has a weapon, I have a weapon, so we are equal; what’s the odds, if we kill one another there’ll be more room in the land.” ’ One soldier, who had also fought in Europe in the First World War, even told Gorky that it was easier to kill a Russian than a foreigner. ‘Our people are many, our economy is poor; well, if a hamlet is burnt, what’s the loss? It would have burnt down itself in due course.’ Life had become so cheap that people thought little of killing one another, or indeed of others killing millions in their name. One peasant asked a scientific expedition working in the Urals during 1921: ‘You are educated people, tell me then what’s to happen to me. A Bashkir killed my cow, so of course I killed the Bashkir and then I took the cow away from his family. So tell me: shall I be punished for the cow?’ When they asked him whether he did not rather expect to be punished for the murder of the man, the peasant replied: ‘That’s nothing, people are cheap nowadays.’

Other stories were told — of a husband who had murdered his wife for no apparent reason. ‘I had enough of her and there is the end of it,’ was the murderer’s explanation. It was as if all the violence of the previous few years had stripped away the thin veneer of civilization covering human relations and exposed the primitive zoological instincts of man. People began to like the smell of blood. They developed a taste for sadistic forms of killing — a subject on which Gorky was an expert:

The peasants in Siberia dug pits and lowered Red Army prisoners into them upside down, leaving their legs to the knees above ground; then they filled in the pit with soil, watching by the convulsions of the legs which of the victims was more resistant, livelier, and which would be the last to die.

In Tambov province Communists were nailed with railway spikes by their left hand and left foot to trees a metre above the soil, and they watched the torments of these deliberately oddly-crucified people.

They would open a prisoner’s belly, take out the small intestine and nailing it to a tree or telegraph pole they drove the man around the tree with blows, watching the intestine unwind through the wound. Stripping a captured officer naked, they tore strips of skin from his shoulders in the form of shoulder straps, and knocked in nails in place of pips; they would pull off the skin along the lines of the sword belt and trouser stripes — this operation was called ‘to dress in uniform’. It, no doubt, demanded much time and considerable skill.4

The single biggest killer of these years — it accounted in all for some five million lives — was the famine crisis of 1921–2. Like all famine crises, the great Volga famine was caused in part by man and in part by God. The natural conditions of the Volga region made it vulnerable to harvest failures — and there had been many in recent years, 1891–2, 1906 and 1911 just to name a few. Summer droughts and extreme frosts were regular features of the steppeland climate. Gusting winds in the spring blew away the sandy topsoil and damaged tender crops. These were the preconditions of the Volga famine in 1921: the crop failure of 1920 was followed by a year of heavy frost and scorching summer drought that transformed the steppelands into one huge dustbowl. By the spring it became clear that the peasants were about to suffer a second harvest failure in succession. Much of the seed had been killed off by the frosts, while the new corn stalks which did emerge were weedy in appearance and soon destroyed by locusts and field-rats. Bad though they were, these cracks in nature’s moulds were not enough to cause a famine crisis. The peasants were accustomed to harvest failures and had always maintained large stocks of grain, often in communal barns, for such emergencies. What made this crisis so disastrous was the fact that the peasant economy had already been brought to the brink of disaster, even before nature took its toll, by the requisitionings of the civil war. To evade the levies the peasants withdrew into subsistence production — they grew just enough grain to feed themselves and their livestock and provide for seed. In other words they left no safety margin, no reserves of the sort that had cushioned them from adverse weather in the past, since they feared that the Bolsheviks would take them. In 1920 the sown area in the Volga region had declined by a quarter since 1917. Yet the Bolsheviks continued to take more — not just surpluses but vital stocks of food and seed — so that when that harvest failed it was bound to result in the ruin of the peasants.5

By the spring of 1921 one-quarter of the peasantry in Soviet Russia was starving. Famine struck not only in the Volga region but in the Urals and Kama basins, the Don, Bashkiria, Kazakhstan, western Siberia and the southern Ukraine. The famine was accompanied by typhus and cholera which killed hundreds of thousands of people already weakened by hunger. The worst affected regions were on the Volga steppe. In Samara province nearly two million people (three-quarters of the population) were said to be dying from hunger by the autumn of 1921: 700,000 of them did in fact die by the end of the crisis. In one typical volost, Bulgakova, with a population of 16,000 in January 1921, 1,000 people had died, 2,200 had abandoned their homes and 6,500 had been paralysed by hunger or disease by the following November. Throughout the Volga region hungry peasants resorted to eating grass, weeds, leaves, moss, tree bark, roof thatch and flour made from acorns, sawdust, clay and horse manure. They slaughtered livestock and hunted rodents, cats and dogs. In the villages there was a deathly silence. Skeletons of people, children with their bellies bloated, lay down quietly like dogs to die. ‘The villagers have simply given up on life,’ one relief worker noted in Saratov. ‘They are too weak even to complain.’ Those with enough strength boarded up their ruined farms, packed their meagre belongings on to carts, and fled to the towns in search of food. At the town markets a few loaves of bread would be exchanged for a horse. Many people did not make it but collapsed and died along the road. Huge crowds converged on the railway stations in the vain hope of catching a train to other regions — Moscow, the Don, Siberia, almost anywhere, so long as it was rumoured there was food. They did not know that all transportation from the famine region had been stopped on Moscow’s orders to limit the spread of epidemics. This was the scene at the Simbirsk railway station in the summer of 1921:

Imagine a compact mass of sordid rags, among which are visible here and there lean, naked arms, faces already stamped with the seal of death. Above all one is conscious of a poisonous odour. It is impossible to pass. The waiting room, the corridor, every foot thickly covered with people, sprawling, seated, crouched in every imaginable position. If one looks closely he sees that these filthy rags are swarming with vermin. The typhus stricken grovel and shiver in their fever, their babies with them. Nursing babies have lost their voices and are no longer able to cry. Every day more than twenty dead are carried away, but it is not possible to remove all of them. Sometimes corpses remain among the living for more than five days …

A woman tries to soothe a small child lying in her lap. The child cries, asking for food. For some time the mother goes on rocking it in her arms. Then suddenly she strikes it. The child screams anew. This seems to drive the woman mad. She begins to beat it furiously, her face distorted with rage. She rains blows with her fist on its little face, on its head and at last she throws it upon the floor and kicks it with her foot. A murmur of horror arises around her. The child is lifted from the ground, curses are hurled at the mother, who, after her furious excitement has subsided, has again become herself, utterly indifferent to everything around her. Her eyes are fixed, but are apparently sightless.6

Hunger turned some people into cannibals. This was a much more common phenomenon than historians have previously assumed. In the Bashkir region and on the steppelands around Pugachev and Buzuluk, where the famine crisis was at its worst, thousands of cases were reported. It is also clear that most of the cannibalism went unreported. One man, convicted of eating several children, confessed for example: ‘In our village everyone eats human flesh but they hide it. There are several cafeterias in the village — and all of them serve up young children.’ The phenomenon really took off with the onset of winter, around November 1921, when the first snows covered the remaining food substitutes on the ground and there was nothing else to eat. Mothers, desperate to feed their children, cut off limbs from corpses and boiled the flesh in pots. People ate their own relatives — often their young children, who were usually the first to die and whose flesh was particularly sweet. In some villages the peasants refused to bury their dead but stored the corpses, like so much meat, in their barns and stables. They often begged relief workers not to take away the corpses but to let them eat them instead. In the village of Ivanovka, near Pugachev, a woman was caught with her child eating her dead husband and when the police authorities tried to take away his remains she shouted: ‘We will not give him up, we need him for food, he is our own family, and no one has the right to take him away from us.’ The stealing of corpses from cemeteries became so common that in many regions armed guards had to be posted on their gates. Hunting and killing people for their flesh was also a common phenomenon. In the town of Pugachev it was dangerous for children to go out after dark since there were known to be bands of cannibals and traders who killed them to eat or sell their tender flesh. In the Novouzensk region there were bands of children who killed adults for their meat. Relief workers were armed for this reason. There were even cases of parents killing their own babies — usually their daughters — in order to eat their flesh or feed it to their other children.

It is easy to say that such acts were simply a sign of moral depravity or psychosis. But it was often compassion which drove people to cannibalism. The agony of watching one’s children slowly die of hunger can spur people to do anything, and in such extreme circumstances the normal rules of right and wrong can seem remote. Indeed when interviewed the flesh-eaters appeared quite rational and had often developed a new moral code to legitimize their behaviour. Many of them argued that eating human flesh could not be a crime because the living soul had already departed from the bodies, which remained ‘only as food for the worms in the ground’. Moreover, the craving for human flesh which starving people can easily develop once they have eaten it was not peculiar to any social class. Hungry doctors often succumbed to eating it after long spells of relief work in the famine region, and they too stated that the worst part of the experience was ‘the insuperable and uncomfortable craving’ which they acquired for human flesh.7

Until July 1921 the Soviet government refused to acknowledge the existence of the famine. It was a major embarrassment. As in the crisis of 1891, the press was even forbidden to use the word ‘famine’. It continued to report that everything was well in the countryside after the introduction of the NEP. This deliberate policy of neglect was even more pronounced in the Ukraine: although famine was widespread there by the autumn of 1921, Moscow continued to export large quantities of grain to the Volga until the following summer. Of course, this was taking from one hungry region to give to another, even hungrier. But it may also be, as Robert Conquest has argued convincingly for the famine of 1930–2, that Moscow sought to punish the Ukrainian peasants for their opposition to the Bolshevik regime.8

As in 1891, it was left to the public and foreign bodies to organize the relief campaign. Gorky took the lead. On 13 July he issued an appeal ‘To All Honest People’ which later appeared in the Western press:

Tragedy has come to the country of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Mendeleev, Pavlov, Mussorgsky, Glinka and other world-prized men. If humanitarian ideas and feelings — faith in whose social import was so shaken by the damnable war and its victors’ unmercifulness towards the vanquished — if faith in the creative force of these ideas and feelings, I say, must and can be restored, Russia’s misfortune offers a splendid opportunity to demonstrate the vitality of humanitarianism. I ask all honest European and American people for prompt aid to the Russian people. Give bread and medicine. Maxim Gorky.

With a group of other public figures Gorky appealed to Lenin for permission to organize a voluntary body for famine relief. The All-Russian Public Committee to Aid the Hungry, or Pomgol for short, set up as a result on 21 July, was the first and the last independent public body established under Communism. It was partly as a concession to Gorky and partly as a means of securing foreign aid that Lenin agreed to its formation. The seventy-three members of Pomgol included leading cultural figures (Gorky, Korolenko, Stanislavsky); liberal politicians (Kishkin, Prokopovich, Kuskova); an ex-tsarist minister (N. N. Kutler) and a veteran Populist (Vera Figner); famous agronomists (Chayanov, Krondatev) and engineers (P. I. Palchinsky); doctors; and Tolstoyans. There was even a place for Alexandra Tolstaya, the writer’s daughter, who had spent the past four years in and out of Cheka jails and labour camps. Pomgol sought to revive the public spirit that had saved the country in 1891: it made appeals to the public at home and abroad to contribute to the relief campaign. Prince Lvov, who had taken part in the relief efforts of thirty years before, collected money and sent off food supplies through the Paris Zemgor organization (even in exile, he continued with his zemstvo work). To make sure that Pomgol did not get involved in politics the Bolsheviks assigned to it a ‘cell’ of twelve prominent Communists led by Kamenev. Lenin was adamant that the famine crisis should not give rise to the same public opposition as that of 1891 had done.9

Responding to Gorky’s appeal, Herbert Hoover offered to send the American Relief Administration to Russia. Hoover had established the ARA to supply food and medicines to postwar Europe. Hoover’s two conditions were that it should be allowed to operate independently, without intervention by the Communist officials, and that all US citizens should be released from Soviet jails. Lenin was furious — ‘One must punish Hoover, one must publicly slap his face so that the whole world sees,’ he fumed — yet like any beggar he could not be choosy. Once Pomgol had secured American aid Lenin ordered it to be closed down, despite vigorous protests from Kamenev and Gorky. On 27 August all its public members — except Gorky and Korolenko — were arrested by the Cheka, accused of all manner of ‘counter-revolutionary activities’, and later sent into exile abroad or to restricted zones in the interior. Even Gorky was pressurized by Lenin to go abroad ‘for his health’.10

By the summer of 1922, when its activities were at their height, the ARA was feeding ten million people every day. It also despatched huge supplies of medicine, clothes, tools and seed — the last enabling the two successive bumper harvests of 1922 and 1923 that finally secured Russia’s recovery from the famine. The total cost of the ARA operation was sixty-one million dollars.

The Bolsheviks received this aid with an astonishing lack of gratitude: never has such a generous gift horse been so shamefully looked in the mouth. They accused the ARA of spying, of trying to discredit and overthrow the Soviet regime,fn2 and constantly meddled in their operations, searching convoys, withholding trains, seizing supplies, and even arresting relief workers. The two conditions of aid set by Hoover — freedom from intervention and the release of all Americans from prison — were thus both blatantly broken by the Bolsheviks. Further outrage was caused in America when it was discovered that at the same time as receiving food aid from the West, the Soviet government was exporting millions of tons of its own cereals for sale abroad. When questioned, the Soviet government claimed that it needed the exports in order to purchase industrial and agricultural equipment from abroad. But the scandal made it impossible to raise extra US funds for the ARA in Russia, and in June 1923 it suspended its operations.11

For Gorky the way the Soviet government had handled the famine crisis was both shameful and embarrassing. It was a major factor in his decision to leave Russia. When the worst of the famine was over the Bolsheviks sent a short formal note of gratitude to the American people. But Gorky was more generous in his thanks. In a letter that voiced many of his deepest ideals, Gorky wrote to Hoover on 30 July 1922:

In all the history of human suffering I know of nothing more trying to the souls of men than the events through which the Russian people are passing, and in the history of practical humanitarianism I know of no accomplishment which in terms of magnitude and generosity can be compared to the relief that you have actually accomplished. Your help will enter history as a unique, gigantic achievement, worthy of the greatest glory, which will long remain in the memory of millions of Russians whom you have saved from death. The generosity of the American people resuscitates the dream of fraternity among people at a time when humanity greatly needs charity and compassion.12

One of the saddest legacies of the revolution was the huge population of orphans who roamed the streets of every city. By 1922 there were an estimated seven million children living rough in stations, derelict houses, building sites, rubbish dumps, cellars, sewers and other squalid holes. These ragged, barefoot children, whose parents had either died or abandoned them, were a symbol of Russia’s social breakdown. Even the family had been destroyed.

These orphans of the revolution were a ghastly caricature of the childhood they had lost. The struggle for survival on the streets forced them to live like adults. They had their own jargon, social groups and moral codes. Children as young as twelve got ‘married’ and had their own children. Many were seasoned alcoholics, heroin or cocaine addicts. Begging, peddling, petty crime and prostitution were the means by which they survived. At stations they swarmed like flies, instantly swooping on any scraps of food thrown to them from the trains. Some child beggars maimed themselves or shamed themselves in public to gain some small gratuity. One boy who lived in the station at Omsk would smear his face with his own excrement if people gave him five kopecks. There was a close connection between them and the criminal underworld. Gangs of children stole from market stalls, mugged pedestrians, picked people’s pockets and broke into shops and houses. Those who were caught were likely to be beaten in the street by members of the public, who had very little sympathy for the orphans, but it seemed that even this would not deter them. The following scene in a market square was witnessed by one observer:

I myself saw a boy of about 10 to 12 years of age reach out, while being beaten with a cane, for a piece of bread already covered with grime and voraciously cram it into his mouth. Blows rained on his back, but the boy, on hands and knees, continued hurriedly to bite off piece after piece so as not to lose the bread. This was near the bread row at the bazaar. Adults — women — gathered around and shouted: ‘That’s what the scoundrel deserves: beat him some more! We get no peace from these lice.’

Nearly all these orphans were casual prostitutes. A survey of 1920 found that 88 per cent of the girls had engaged at some time in prostitution, while similar figures were found among the boys. Some of the girls were as young as seven. Most of the sexual acts took place in the streets, in market-places, in station-halls and parks. The girls had pimps — themselves usually no more than teenage boys — who often used them to rob their clients. But there were also paedophiliac brothels run by so-called ‘aunties’, who gave the children food and a corner of a room, whilst putting them to work and living off their earnings.13 For millions of children this was the closest thing they ever had to maternal care.

‘There are twelve-year-old children who already have three murders to their name,’ Gorky wrote to Lenin in April 1920. Once an orphan of the streets himself, Gorky was one of the first to champion the struggle against ‘juvenile delinquency’. That summer he set up a special commission to combat the problem, which provided colonies and shelters for the children and taught them how to read and write. Similar initiatives were undertaken by the League for the Rescue of Children established in 1919 by Kuskova and Korolenko with the approval of Sovnarkom. But with only half a million places in all the institutions put together, and seven million orphans on the street, this could only scratch the surface of the problem. Increasingly, the Bolsheviks turned to penal remedies, despite their own proclaimed principle of 1918 that there should be ‘no courts or prisons for children’. Prisons and labour camps contained thousands of children, many under fourteen, the age of criminal responsibility. Another way of dealing with the problem was to allow factories to employ the children as sweated labour. Even in the civil war, when thousands of adult workers were laid off, there was a huge growth of child employment, with some workers as young as six, especially in the smaller factories where exploitative practices died hard. Despite widespread calls to limit the children to six hours of labour, and to make employers provide two hours of schooling, the authorities chose not to intervene, claiming it was ‘better to have the children working than living from crime on the streets’, with the result that many minors ended up by working twelve or fourteen hours every day.14

Children also made excellent soldiers. The Red Army had many young teenagers in its ranks. Having spent the whole of their conscious lives surrounded by the violence of war and revolution, many of them had no doubt come to think that killing people was part of normal life. These little soldiers were noted for their readiness to do as they were told — their commanders often played the role of surrogate fathers — as well as for their ruthless ability to kill the enemy, especially when led to believe that they were avenging their parents’ murder. Ironically, many of these children were in fact much better off in the army — which treated them as its own children, clothing and feeding them and teaching them to read — than they would have been living on the streets.

*

According to Nina Berberova, Gorky came to Europe angry not only at what had been done in Russia but profoundly shaken by what he had seen and experienced. She recalls a conversation he had with her husband, the poet Khodasevich:

Both (but at different times) in 1920 went to a children’s home, or perhaps reformatory for pre-teenagers. These were mostly girls, syphilitics, homeless from twelve to fifteen; nine out of ten were thieves, half were pregnant. Khodasevich … with a kind of pity and revulsion remembered how these girls in rags and lice had clung to him, ready to undress him there on the staircase, and lifted their torn skirts above their heads, shouting obscenities at him. With difficulty he tore himself away from them. Gorky went through a similar scene: when he began to speak about it, horror was on his face, he clenched his jaws and suddenly became silent. It was clear that his visit shook him deeply — more, perhaps, than his previous impressions of tramps, the horrors of the lower depths from which he took his early subject matter. Perhaps, now in Europe, he was healing certain wounds he himself was afraid to admit to; and at times … he asked himself, and only himself: Was it worth it?

Gorky was himself an orphan of the revolution. All his hopes for the revolution — hopes by which he had defined himself — had been abandoned in the past four years. Instead of being a constructive cultural force the revolution had virtually destroyed the whole of Russian civilization; instead of human liberation it had merely brought human enslavement; and instead of the spiritual improvement of humanity it had led to degradation. Gorky had become deeply disillusioned. He described himself in 1921 as ‘in a misanthropic mood’. He could not reconcile his own humanist and democratic socialism with the realities of Lenin’s Russia. He could no longer ‘turn a deaf ear’ to the faults of the regime in the hope of doing good and reforming it later: all his efforts had come to naught. If his own ideals had been abandoned in Russia, there was nothing left for him to do but abandon Russia.15

Gorky’s decision to emigrate from Russia was preceded by mounting conflict with the Bolsheviks. The mindless terror of the past four years, the destruction of the intelligentsia, the persecution of the Mensheviks and SRs, the crushing of the Kronstadt rebels, and the Bolsheviks’ callousness towards the famine crisis — all these had turned Gorky into a bitter enemy of the new regime. Much of Gorky’s enmity focused on Zinoviev, the party boss in his own Petrograd. Zinoviev disliked Gorky, he saw his house as a ‘nest of counter-revolution’, and placed him under constant surveillance: Gorky’s mail was opened; his house was constantly searched; and his close friends were threatened with arrest. Gorky’s most angry letters of denunciation during the Red Terror were all addressed to Zinoviev. In one he claimed that his constant arrests had made ‘people hate not only Soviet Power but — in particular — you in person’. Yet it soon became clear that behind Zinoviev stood Lenin himself. The Bolshevik leader was scathing about Gorky’s denunciations. In a menacing letter of July 1919 he claimed that the writer’s whole ‘state of mind’ had been made ‘quite sick’ by the ‘embittered bourgeois intellectuals’ who ‘surrounded’ him in Petrograd. ‘I don’t want to thrust my advice on you,’ Lenin threatened, ‘but I cannot help saying: change your circumstances radically, your environment, your abode, your occupation — otherwise life may disgust you for good.’16

Gorky’s disillusionment with Lenin deepened during 1920. The Bolshevik leader was opposed to the editorial independence of Gorky’s publishing house, World Literature, and threatened to cease supporting it financially. Gorky complained bitterly to Lunacharsky. He rightly suspected that Lenin was trying to bring all publishing under state control — something he found anathema — and claimed (or threatened) that the only way to keep the project going was to run it from abroad. But with the stern Lenin breathing down his neck there was little the commissar could do. In his play Don Quixote (1922) Lunacharsky reenacted the strained triangular relationship between himself (in the part of Don Balthazar), Gorky (Don Quixote) and Lenin (Don Rodrigo). Here are Don Balthazar’s parting words to Don Quixote. They summarize the clash between Gorky and Lenin — between the ideals of the revolution and its grim ‘necessities’:

If we had not broken the plots in the rear, we would have led our army to ruin. Ah, Don Quixote! I do not wish to aggravate your guilt, but here you played your fatal role. I will not hide the fact that it came into stern Rodrigo’s head to bring down the threatening hand of the law on you, as a lesson to all the soft-hearted people who thrust themselves and their philanthropy into life, which is stern and complicated and full of responsibility.17

The deaths of two of Russia’s greatest poets, Alexander Blok and Nikolai Gumilev, were the last straw for Gorky. Blok had been struck down in 1920 by rheumatic fever as a result of living through the civil war in unheated lodgings and in hunger. But Blok’s real affliction was despair and disillusionment with the outcome of the revolution. To begin with he had welcomed its destructive violence as a purgatory for the rotten old world of Europe out of which a new and purer world of Asiatics — the Scythians — would emerge. His epic poem ‘The Twelve’, written in 1918, had depicted twelve rough Red Guards marching ‘in step with the Revolution’ through a blinding snowstorm destroying the old world and making the new. At their head, bearing the Red Flag, wreathed in white roses, and walking lightly above the snow, was the figure of Jesus Christ. Blok later noted that while writing this sensational poem: ‘I kept hearing — I mean literally hearing with my ears — a great noise around me, a noise made up of many sounds (it was probably the noise of the old world crumbling).’ For a while Blok continued to believe in the messianic mission of the Bolsheviks. But by 1921 he had become disillusioned. For three years there was no poetry. Gorky, a close friend, compared him to a ‘lost child’. Blok plagued him with questions about death and said that he had given up all ‘faith in the wisdom of humanity’. Kornei Chukovsky recalled Blok’s appearance at a poetry reading in May 1921: ‘I was sitting backstage with him. On stage some “orator” or other … was cheerfully demonstrating to the crowd that as a poet Blok was already dead … Blok leaned over to me and said, “That’s true. He’s telling the truth, I’m dead.” ’ When Chukovsky asked him why he did not write poetry any more, Blok told him: ‘All sounds have stopped. Can’t you hear that there are no longer any sounds?’ That same month Blok took to his death-bed. His doctor insisted that he needed to be sent abroad to a special sanatorium. On 29 May Gorky wrote to Lunacharsky on his behalf. ‘Blok is Russia’s finest living poet. If you forbid him to go abroad, and he dies, you and your comrades will be guilty of his death.’ For several weeks Gorky continued to plead for a visa. Lunacharsky wrote in support to the Central Committee on 11 July. But nothing was done. Then, at last, on 10 August, a visa came. It was one day late: the night before the poet had died.18

If Blok had died through despair and neglect, the death of Gumilev, just two weeks later, was much more straightforward. He was arrested by the Petrograd Cheka, jailed for a few days, and then shot without trial. Gumilev was accused of being involved in a monarchist conspiracy — an allegation that was almost certainly false, although he was a monarchist by sentiment. A committee of intellectuals formed at Blok’s funeral had petitioned for his release. The Academy of Sciences had offered to guarantee his appearance in court. Gorky was asked to intervene and rushed to Moscow to see Lenin. But by the time he returned to Petrograd with an order for his release, Gumilev had already been shot. Gorky was so upset he coughed up blood. Zamyatin said he had never seen him ‘so angry as he was on the night when Gumilev was shot’.19

Gumilev was the first great Russian poet to be executed by the Bolsheviks. His and Blok’s deaths symbolized for Gorky, as for the intelligentsia as a whole, the death of the revolution. Hundreds of people — ‘all that remained of literary Petersburg’ in Zamyatin’s words — turned out for the funeral of Blok. Nina Berberova, then only a young girl, recalls how on seeing the announcement of Blok’s death she was ‘seized by a feeling, which I never again experienced, that I was suddenly and sharply orphaned … The end is coming. We are lost.’ Anna Akhmatova, Gumilev’s first wife, similarly mourned, not just for a poet but for the ideals of a generation, at Blok’s funeral:

In a silver coffin we bore him

Alexander, our pure swan,

Our sun extinguished in torment.20

Two months later, plagued by ill health himself, Gorky left Russia, seemingly for good.

ii The Unconquered Country

Fours years of revolution had not reunited the villagers of Andreevskoe. They remained divided between the two old rivals. On the one side stood Sergei Semenov, progressive farmer and reformer, who dreamt of bringing the trappings of the modern world to this poor and God-forsaken hole. On the other stood Grigorii Maliutin, the heavy-built and heavy-drinking peasant elder, an Old Believer and opponent of all change, who had now resisted Semenov’s reform efforts for the best part of thirty years.

The feud between them had begun in the 1890s, when Maliutin’s daughter, Vera, had killed her illegitimate baby and buried it in the nearby woods. The police had arrived to investigate, and the rich Maliutin had been forced to buy them off. He accused Semenov of informing the police and began a campaign of intimidation — burning his barn down, killing his livestock, accusing him of sorcery — to drive him from the village. Maliutin finally achieved his aim in 1905 when Semenov established a branch of the Peasant Union in Andreevskoe; this was enough to make him a dangerous revolutionary in the eyes of the local judiciary, and he was sent into exile abroad. But three years later he returned to Andreevskoe as a pioneer of Stolypin’s land reforms. He tried to introduce the advanced farming methods he had learned in Western Europe on private plots hived off from the commune. Some of the younger and more progressive peasants joined his enclosure movement. But Maliutin was once again enraged — within the commune he was the boss — and along with the other elders of the village had succeeded in blocking his reforms. ‘All my dreams for a better life’, Semenov wrote to a friend in 1916, ‘have been destroyed by this obstinate and jealous man.’

The revolution tipped the scales in Semenov’s favour. The old power structure upon which Maliutin had depended, of the volost elder, the local police and the gentry land captain, was dismantled overnight. Within the village the voice of the younger and more progressive farmers was also becoming more dominant, while that of the old patriarchal leaders like Maliutin, who saw nothing good in the revolution, was increasingly ignored. As a champion of reform, Semenov became a dominant figure at the village assembly. He always spoke out against the old patriarchal order and the influence of the Church. In 1917 he helped to organize the land redivision in Andreevskoe, cutting down Maliutin’s farm to half its size. He was active in both the district Soviet land department and the local co-operatives; established associations for the purchase of advanced tools, market gardening, improved dairy farming and flax cultivation; wrote pamphlets and gave lectures on agronomy; campaigned against alcoholism; set up a school and a library in the village; and even wrote plays for the ‘people’s theatre’ which he had established with his schoolteacher friend in the nearby township of Bukholovo. He even drew up plans on how to cover the villages of Volokolamsk with electric and telephone cables which he sent to the Moscow Soviet. Although Semenov’s Tolstoyan beliefs prevented him from taking up office in the village or the volost Soviet, there was no doubt, as one local put it, ‘that the peasants, not just of Andreevskoe, but of the whole region as well, saw him as their leader and champion’.

Meanwhile, Maliutin and his fellow elders continued to oppose his every move. They claimed that he was a Communist — and that his reforms in the village had merely brought upon it all the evils of the new regime. The local priest accused him of sorcery, and warned that his ‘atheism’ would lead to the devil. Archdeacon Tsvetkov of Volokolamsk joined in the denunciations, claiming that Semenov was the Antichrist. The new village school, organized by Semenov in 1919, enraged them especially, since it was built from timber taken from the woods that had belonged to Maliutin and the Church before they had been nationalized. Moreover, the school had no religious instruction. In place of the cross on the classroom wall there was the obligatory portrait of Lenin. One night Semenov’s barn was burnt; on another his farm tools were taken and sunk in the lake. Anonymous denunciations were sent to the local Cheka claiming that Semenov was a ‘counter-revolutionary’ and a ‘German spy’: on more than one occasion Semenov was hauled in by the Cheka to answer for his actions, although a brief call to Kamenev, the Chairman of the Moscow Soviet, whom Semenov vaguely knew, was always enough to release him. During 1921, when Russia was hit by various cattle epidemics, Maliutin and his allies blamed the death of the livestock in the village on Semenov’s ‘evil reforms’. It was even claimed that he had ‘made the cattle ill by sorcery’. Some of the peasants now became confused. Although they knew that throughout Russia cattle were dying from similar diseases, they wanted explanations for their own losses, and some now became suspicious of Semenov.

In the end, Maliutin organized his old rival’s murder. On the night of 15 December 1922, as he was walking to Bukholovo, Semenov was ambushed by several men, including two of Maliutin’s sons, who suddenly appeared from their sister Vera’s house on the edge of the village. One of them shot Semenov in the back. As he turned to face his attackers they fired several more shots, and then, as he lay dead on the ground, blew off his face. They cut the blood-red sign of a cross into his chest.

It had been a cowardly murder. Semenov had always faced his rivals openly and had been fair to their points of view; yet they maligned him and shot him in the back. Later, when the murderers were arrested, they claimed that Semenov had been ‘working for the devil’ and that he had conjured up the cattle plague. They also confessed that Grigorii Maliutin and the Archdeacon Tsvetkov had ordered them to kill Semenov — ‘in the name of God’, as the latter had told them. They were all convicted of conspiring to murder and sentenced to ten years of hard labour each in the Arctic north.

Semenov was buried on his own beloved plot of land in Andreevskoe: he became a part of the soil for which he had lived and struggled all these years. Thousands of people from the surrounding villages attended the funeral, including hundreds of schoolchildren whom Semenov had personally taught. ‘It is tragic to lose such a life’, his friend Belousov said in his address, ‘just at the moment when his work and teachings have become so badly needed by the people.’ To commemorate Semenov’s achievements, the village school was named after him, while his farm was preserved by the state, and run by his son until 1929, as a model farm to show the peasants the benefits of the latest agricultural innovations. Semenov would have been deeply touched: it was something he had dreamed of all his life.21

Never known to miss an opportunity for party propaganda, Pravda focused on this small provincial tale. It portrayed Maliutin as the evil ‘kulak’ and Semenov as the poor but politically conscious peasant. All of which was of course nonsense — Semenov was no more poor than Maliutin was a ‘kulak’, and in any case it was not class that had divided them. What the murder really showed was that less than a hundred miles from Moscow there were villages, such as Andreevskoe, which modern civilization had not yet reached — a world apart where the people still believed in witchcraft and lived as if they were trapped in the Middle Ages. The Bolsheviks had yet to conquer this unknown country. They looked at it with misapprehension, like an army in a foreign land. Early Soviet ethnographers, who set out for the countryside around Moscow like explorers for the Amazon forests, found that many of their fellow Russians still believed the earth was flat, that angels lived in clouds, and that the sun went around the earth. They discovered a strange village culture steeped in archaic and patriarchal ways, a world where time was still measured by the seasons and religious holidays as opposed to months, a world full of pagan rituals and superstitions, of wife-beating, mob law, fist fights and bouts of drinking that went on for days.

The Bolsheviks were unable to understand this world — Marx had said nothing about sorcery — let alone to govern it. Their state infrastructure had only got as far as the volost townships. Most of the villages were still governed by their own commune, whose smallholding ‘peasant’ nature had been greatly strengthened by the revolution and the civil war. Indeed, Russia as a whole had become much more ‘peasant’ in the previous few years. The great urban populations had largely disintegrated, industry had been virtually destroyed and the thin veneer of provincial civilization had been swept away by the revolution. The smallholding peasants were all that was left. No wonder so many Bolsheviks felt threatened by the peasant mass. Gorky, who was just as hostile to the ‘barbaric peasants’, expressed their fears. ‘The immense peasant tide will end by engulfing everything,’ he told a foreign visitor shortly before his departure for Berlin. ‘The peasant will become the master of Russia by sheer force of numbers. And it will be a disaster for our future.’22 This fear of the peasant was the great unresolved tension of the 1920s — one that led inexorably towards the tragedy of collectivization.

True, rural life was not all dark. Under the NEP some of the trappings of the modern world began to trickle down to the villages. Electric power came. Even Andreevskoe had its first electric cables in 1927, thus finally realizing Semenov’s dream. Lenin had extolled the new technology as a panacea for Russia’s backwardness. ‘Communism equals Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country,’ his famous slogan went. He seemed to equate it with magical powers, once even prophesying that the light bulb — or the ‘little Ilich lamps’, as they became known — would replace the icon in the peasants’ huts. In Soviet propaganda the light bulb became a symbol for the torch of enlightenment: light was a metaphor for everything good, just as darkness was for poverty and evil. Photographs showed the peasants marvelling in almost religious wonderment at the new electric spheres of light. As Lenin saw it, a national grid would integrate the remote village world into the modern culture of the cities. Backward peasant Russia would be led out of darkness by the light of industry, and would come to enjoy a bright new future of rapid economic progress, mass education and liberation from the drudgery of manual labour. Much of this was fantasy: centuries of backwardness could not be overcome by a simple switch. Lenin, for so long the critic of utopianism, had at last succumbed, as H. G. Wells put it, to this ‘utopia of the electricians’ and, in contravention of all Marxist doctrine, had placed his faith in technology to overcome Russia’s deep-rooted social problems.23

There were other signs of rural civilization in the 1920s. Hospitals, theatres, cinemas and libraries began to appear in the countryside. The period of the NEP witnessed a whole range of agronomic improvements which amounted to nothing less than an agricultural revolution. The narrow and intermingled arable strips that had made communal farming so inefficient were rearranged or broadened on nearly a hundred million hectares of allotment land. Multi-field crop rotations such as those of Western Europe were introduced on nearly one-fifth of all communal land. Chemical fertilizers, graded seed and advanced tools were used by the peasants in growing numbers. Dairy farming was modernized; and many peasants turned to market crops, such as vegetables, flax and sugar beet, which before the revolution had been grown exclusively by the commercial farms of the gentry. Semenov, who in his own times had pioneered such reforms, would have been no less pleased by the rural co-operatives — both for commodity exchange with the towns and for credit to purchase tools and livestock — which grew impressively in the 1920s. By 1927, 50 per cent of all peasant households belonged to an agricultural co-operative. As a result of these improvements, there was a steady rise in productivity. The 1913 levels of agricultural production were regained by 1926, and surpassed in the next two years. The harvest yields of the mid-1920s were 17 per cent higher than those of the 1900s, the so-called ‘golden age’ of Russian agriculture.24

There were also real gains in literacy, resuming the trend of the 1900s, as more village schools were built in the 1920s. By 1926, 51 per cent of the Soviet population was considered literate (compared with 43 per cent in 1917, and 35 per cent in 1907). The biggest gains were among village youth: peasant sons in their early twenties were more than twice as likely to be literate than their fathers’ generation; while young peasant women of the same age were five times more likely to be literate than their mothers’. This growing generation gap was both demographic and cultural. By 1926, more than half the rural population was under the age of twenty, and over two-thirds under thirty. These were by and large the literate peasants. Many of them were acquainted with the world outside the village through their service in the army. They challenged the authority of their peasant elders, rarely went to church and displayed a strong individualist striving reflected in a sharp increase of household partitioning during the 1920s, as these sons broke away from their fathers and set up nuclear households of their own. Peasant sons were also increasingly ousting their fathers as the head of the household and gaining a greater say in the running of the farm.25 The Russian village was much less split between rich and poor, as the Bolsheviks had mistakenly believed, than it was divided between fathers and sons.

This generational conflict helped the Bolsheviks to build up their influence in the countryside through the organization of its restless youth. The Komsomol grew much more rapidly than the party in the countryside — from 80,000 members in 1922 to well over half a million, three times the number of rural Bolsheviks, by 1925. The Komsomol was a social club for the bored teenagers of the village. It organized them in a crusade against the Church and the old patriarchal order. Its aim was ‘to turn the village upside down’. Through its recruitment for the party it also offered these ambitious youths the chance to advance themselves and leave the backward village, which so many of them had come to despise, for the bright lights of the urban world. A survey of the Komsomol in one of the most agricultural districts of Voronezh province during the mid-1920s found that 85 per cent of its members came from peasant families; yet only 3 per cent said that they wanted to work in agriculture. In 1923 a young student of ethnography summarized the attitudes of his contemporaries in his village in Volokolamsk, not far from Semenov’s Andreevskoe:

This is what the young people say about their elders: ‘The old people are fools. They work themselves to exhaustion and get nothing from it. They don’t know anything except how to plough — which is to say they don’t know anything … Give up the farm. It is not profitable and does not justify the labour spent on it’ … [The young people want] to get away, to get away as quickly as possible. Anywhere, if one can only get away — to the factory, to the army, to study, or become an officer — it doesn’t matter.26

Semenov and Kanatchikov had noted the same attitudes thirty years before. The rejection of the village by its youth was, it seems, a constant source of Bolshevik recruitment.

The Red Army, along with the Komsomol, was a means of organizing this restless village youth. Young men who had returned from the army often took the lead in the rural Soviets and in the Komsomol crusade against the old rural order. One group of veterans held a ‘congress’ in their village to discuss ways to organize a ‘struggle against darkness, religion, moonshine and other evils’. Having grown accustomed to the army life, these young veterans soon became bored with the life of the village, where, as one of them put it, ‘there are no cultures of any kind’. They despised the old rural ways of the village and, if they did not leave it altogether, sought in every way to set themselves apart by adopting urban and military dress. One source noted that all ‘former soldiers, rural activists, and Komsomols — that is all those who counted themselves progressive people — went around in military and semi-military uniforms’. Many of these youths later played an active role in Stalin’s campaign of collectivization. They joined the grain-requisitioning squads which resumed the civil war against the village after 1927; set up ‘initiative groups’ to organize collective farms; took part in the renewed attacks on the Church; helped to suppress peasant resistance; and later became officials or machine operators in the new collective farms.27

And yet the fact remained that within the village the Bolsheviks were without real authority. This was the root cause of the failure of the NEP. Unable to govern the countryside by peaceable means, the Bolsheviks resorted to terrorizing it, ending up in collectivization. The events of 1918–21 had left a deep scar on peasant–state relations. Although the civil war between them had come to an end, the two sides faced each other with deep suspicion and mistrust during the uneasy truce of the 1920s. Through passive and everyday forms of resistance — foot-dragging, habitual failure to understand instructions, apathy and inertia — the peasants hoped to keep the Bolsheviks at bay. As the party took over the Soviet administration in the volost townships, the peasants withdrew from the Soviets altogether and regrouped politically in their village communes. The resurrection of the absolutist state thus recreated the ancient division between the volost as the seat of state or gentry power — ‘interested only in collecting taxes’, as one peasant put it — and the village as the domain of the peasants. Outside the volost townships the Bolsheviks had no authority. Nearly all their members were concentrated there, where they were needed to run the fledgling organs of the state. Very few rural Bolsheviks lived in the villages or had any real ties with the peasantry. Only 15 per cent of the rural party members were engaged in farming; while less than 10 per cent came from the region to which they were assigned. As for the rural party meetings, they were concerned mainly with state policy, international events and even sexual ethics — but very rarely with agricultural matters.

The rural Soviets were just as powerless. Although technically subordinated to the volost administration, their mainly peasant members were reluctant to go against the interests of the village communes, upon whose taxes they depended for their budgets. Indeed the villagers often elected a simpleton or an alcoholic, or perhaps some poor peasant in debt to the village elders, in order to sabotage the Soviet’s work. It was an old trick of the peasants and had been applied to the volost administration before 1917. The Bolsheviks, in their usual inept manner, responded by centralizing power, cutting down the number of rural Soviets; yet this made matters worse, for it left the vast majority of the villages without a Soviet at all. By 1929, the average rural Soviet was trying to rule nine separate villages with a combined population of 1,500 people. Without telephones, and sometimes even without transport, the Soviet officials were rendered impotent. Taxes could not be properly collected, Soviet laws could not be enforced. As for the rural police force, it was minuscule, with each policeman on average responsible for 20,000 people in eighteen or even twenty villages.28 A decade after 1917 the vast majority of the countryside had yet to experience Soviet power.

There was a common assumption among those Bolsheviks who wrote about the NEP — Bukharin was a classic example — that the growing affluence and cultural advancement of the countryside would somehow dissolve this political problem. This was mistaken. Under the smallholding system of the NEP the political culture of the village became even more distinctly ‘peasant’, in fundamental opposition to the state, and no amount of propaganda or education could ever hope to bridge this gap. Why, after all, should a better-educated peasant be more susceptible to Communist control or indoctrination? The rural intelligentsia, who alone could have played an intermediary role between the peasantry and the regime, was a tiny island in this peasant ocean, with its own distinct urban culture and, by all accounts, increasingly mistrusted by the peasants.29 The longer the NEP went on, the greater the disjunction became between the ambitions of the Soviet regime and its impotence in the countryside. Militant Bolsheviks were increasingly afraid that the revolution would degenerate, that it would sink in the ‘kulak’ mud, unless a new civil war was launched to subjugate the village to the town. Here were the roots of Stalin’s civil war against the village, the civil war of collectivization. Without the means to govern the village, let alone to transform it on socialist lines, the Bolsheviks sought to abolish it instead.

iii Lenin’s Last Struggle

The first signs that Lenin was unwell became apparent in 1921 when he began to complain of headaches and exhaustion. Doctors could not diagnose the illness — it was as much the result of a mental breakdown as a physical one. For the past four years Lenin had been working virtually without a break for up to sixteen hours every day. The only real periods of rest had been in the summer of 1917, when he was on the run from Kerensky’s government, and during the weeks of recuperation from Kaplan’s assassination attempt in August 1918. The crisis of 1920–1 had taken a heavy toll on Lenin’s health. The physical symptoms of ‘Lenin’s rage’, as Krupskaya once described it, sleeplessness and irritation, headaches and depressed exhaustion, returned to dog him during his bitter struggles with the Workers’ Opposition and the revolts in the country at large. The Kronstadt rebels, the workers and the peasants, the Mensheviks, the SRs and the clergy, who were all arrested and shot in large numbers, became victims of his rage. By the summer of 1921, Lenin had once again emerged victorious; yet the signs of his mental exhaustion were clear for all to see. He showed lapses of memory, speech difficulties and erratic movements. Some doctors put it down to lead poisoning from Kaplan’s two bullets, which were still lodged in Lenin’s arm and neck (the one in his neck was surgically removed during the spring of 1922). But others suspected paralysis. Their suspicions were confirmed on 25 May 1922, when Lenin suffered his first major stroke, leaving his right side virtually paralysed and depriving him for a while of speech. Lenin now realized, in the words of his sister, Maria Ul’ianova, who was to nurse him until his death, ‘that it was all finished for him’. He begged Stalin to give him poison so that he could kill himself. ‘He doesn’t want to live and can’t live any longer,’ Krupskaya told him. She had tried to give Lenin cyanide but lost her nerve, so the two of them had decided to ask Stalin instead as a ‘firm and steely man devoid of sentimentality’. Although Stalin would later wish him dead, he refused to help him die; and the Politburo voted against it. For the moment, Lenin was more useful to Stalin alive.30

During the summer of 1922, as he recovered at his country house at Gorki, Lenin concerned himself with the question of his succession. This must have been a painful task for him since, like all dictators, he was fiercely jealous of his own power and evidently thought that no one else was good enough to inherit it. All Lenin’s last writings make it clear that he favoured a collective leadership to succeed him. He was particularly afraid of the personal rivalry between Trotsky and Stalin, which he realized might split the party as he withdrew from the scene, and sought to forestall this by balancing the one against the other.

Both men had virtues in his eyes. Trotsky was a brilliant orator and administrator: he more than anyone had won the civil war. But his pride and arrogance — not to speak of his past as a Menshevik or his Jewish-intellectual looks — made him unpopular in the party (both the Military and the Workers’ Oppositions had to a large extent been against him personally). Trotsky was not a natural ‘comrade’. He would always rather be the general of his own army than a colonel in a collective command. It was this which gave him the position of an ‘outsider’ to the rank and file. Although a member of the Politburo, Trotsky had never held a party post. He rarely attended party meetings. Lenin’s feelings towards Trotsky were summarized by Maria Ul’ianova: ‘He did not feel sympathy for Trotsky — he had too many characteristics that made it extraordinarily hard to work collectively with him. But he was an industrious worker and a talented person, and for V. I. that was the main thing, so he tried to keep him on board. Whether it was worth it is another question.’31

Stalin, by contrast, seemed at first much more suited to the needs of a collective leadership. During the civil war he had taken on himself a huge number of mundane jobs that no one else had wanted — he was the Commissar for Nationalities, the Commissar of Rabkrin, a member of the Revolutionary Military Council, of the Politburo and the Orgburo, and the Chairman of the Secretariat — with the result that he soon gained a reputation for modest and industrious mediocrity. Here was the ‘grey blur’ whom Sukhanov had described in 1917. All the party leaders made the same mistake of underestimating Stalin’s potential power, and his ambition to exercise it, as a result of the patronage he had accrued from holding all these posts. Lenin was as guilty as the rest. For a man of such intolerance, he proved remarkably tolerant of Stalin’s many sins, not least his growing rudeness towards himself, in the belief that he needed Stalin to maintain unity in the party. It was for this reason that, on Stalin’s own urging, and apparently backed by Kamenev, he agreed to make Stalin the party’s first General Secretary in April 1922. It was to prove a crucial appointment — one that enabled Stalin to come to power. Yet by the time Lenin came to realize this, and tried to have Stalin removed from the post, it was already too late.32

The key to Stalin’s growing power was his control of the party apparatus in the provinces. As the Chairman of the Secretariat, and the only Politburo member in the Orgburo, he could promote his friends and dismiss opponents.

During the course of 1922 alone more than 10,000 provincial officials were appointed by the Orgburo and the Secretariat, most of them on Stalin’s personal recommendation. They were to be his main supporters during the power struggle against Trotsky in 1922–3. Most of them came, like Stalin himself, from very humble backgrounds and had received little formal education. Mistrusting intellectuals such as Trotsky, they preferred to place their trust in Stalin’s wisdom, with his simple calls for proletarian unity and Bolshevik discipline, when it came to matters of ideology.

Lenin had gone along with Stalin’s growing powers of ‘appointmentism’ from Moscow as an antidote to the formation of provincial opposition factions (the Workers’ Opposition, for example, remained strong in the Ukraine and Samara until 1923). As the Chairman of the Secretariat, Stalin spent much of his time rooting out potential troublemakers from the provincial party apparatus. He received monthly reports from the Cheka (renamed the GPU in 1922) on the activities of the provincial leaders. Boris Bazhanov, Stalin’s personal secretary, recalls his habit of pacing up and down his large Kremlin office, puffing on his pipe, and then issuing the curt command to remove such and such a Party Secretary and send so and so to replace him. There were few party leaders, including members of the Politburo, whom Stalin did not have under surveillance by the end of 1922. Under the guise of enforcing Leninist orthodoxy, Stalin was thus able to gather information about all his rivals, including many things they would rather have kept secret, which he could use to secure their loyalty to himself.33

While Lenin recovered from his stroke Russia was ruled by the triumvirate — Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev — which had emerged as an anti-Trotsky bloc during the summer of 1922. The three met before party meetings to agree their strategy and instruct their followers on how to vote. Kamenev had long had a soft spot for Stalin: they had been together in exile in Siberia; and Stalin had sprung to his defence when Lenin tried to have him kicked out of the party for his opposition to the October coup. Kamenev had ambitions to lead the party and this had led him to side with Stalin against Trotsky, whom he considered the more serious threat. Since Trotsky was Kamenev’s brother-in-law, this meant putting faction before family. As for Zinoviev, he had little love for Stalin. But his hatred for Trotsky was so all-consuming that he would have sided with the Devil so long as it secured his enemy’s defeat. Both men thought they were using Stalin, whom they considered a mediocrity, to promote their own claims to the leadership. But Stalin was using them, and, once Trotsky had been defeated, he went on to destroy them.

By September Lenin had recovered and was back at work. He now became suspicious of Stalin’s ambitions and in an effort to counteract his growing power proposed to appoint Trotsky as his deputy in Sovnarkom. Trotsky’s followers have always argued that this would have made their hero Lenin’s heir.

But in fact the post was seen by many people as a minor one — power was concentrated in the party organs rather than the government ones — and no doubt for this reason Stalin was happy to vote for Lenin’s resolution in the Politburo. Indeed it was Trotsky who was most opposed, writing on his voting slip: ‘Categorically refuse’. He claimed that his objections were on the grounds that he had already criticized the post in principle when it had been introduced the previous May. Later he also claimed that he had turned the post down on the grounds that he was a Jew and that this might add fuel to the propaganda of the regime’s enemies (see here). But his refusal was probably as much because he thought it was beneath him to be merely a ‘deputy chairman’.

This does not mean that Lenin shared this dim view of the Sovnarkom job. Nor does it mean that he offered it to Trotsky, in the words of Lenin’s sister, as merely a ‘diplomatic gesture’ to compensate for the fact that ‘Ilich was on Stalin’s side.’ Lenin had always placed a higher value on the work of Sovnarkom than on that of the party itself. Sovnarkom was Lenin’s baby, it was where he focused all his energies, even to the point where, amazingly, he became ignorant of party life. ‘I am admittedly not familiar with the scale of the Orgburo’s “assignment” work,’ he confessed to Stalin in October 1921. This was Lenin’s tragedy. During his last months of active politics, as he came to grapple with the problem of the growing power of the leading party bodies, he increasingly looked to Sovnarkom as a means of dividing the power between the party and the state. Yet Sovnarkom, as Lenin’s personal seat of power, was bound to decline as he became ill and withdrew from politics. Even with Trotsky standing in for him as chairman, it was almost certainly too late to halt the shift in power to the party organs in Stalin’s hands, and Trotsky must have known this.34

Lenin’s suspicions of Stalin deepened when, in October, Stalin proposed to expel Trotsky from the Politburo as a punishment for his arrogant rejection of the Sovnarkom post. It became clear to Lenin, as he acquainted himself with the activities of the triumvirate, that it was acting like a ruling clique and intended to oust him from power. This was confirmed when Lenin discovered that as soon as he retired from the Politburo meetings, which he often had to leave early because of exhaustion, the triumvirate would pass vital resolutions which he would only learn about the next day. Lenin now ordered (on 8 December) that Politburo meetings were not to go on for more than three hours and that all matters left unresolved were to be put off to the following day. At the same time, or so Trotsky later claimed, Lenin approached him with an offer to join him in a ‘bloc against bureaucracy’, meaning a coalition against Stalin and his power base in the Orgburo. Trotsky’s claim is credible. This, after all, was on the eve of Lenin’s Testament, which was mainly concerned with the problem of Stalin and his hold on the bureaucracy. Trotsky had already criticized the party bureaucracy, Rabkrin and the Orgburo in particular. And we know that Lenin shared his opposition to Stalin on both foreign trade and the Georgian issue. In sum, it seems that towards mid-December Lenin and Trotsky were coming together against Stalin. And then suddenly, on the night of 15 December, Lenin suffered his second major stroke.35

Stalin at once took charge of Lenin’s doctors and, on the pretext of speeding his recovery, obtained from the Central Committee an order giving him the power to keep him ‘in isolation’ from politics by restricting visitors and correspondence. ‘Neither friends nor those around him’, read a further order of the Politburo on 24 December, ‘are allowed to tell Vladimir Ilich any political news, since this might cause him to reflect and get excited.’ Confined to his wheelchair, and allowed to dictate for only ‘5 to 10 minutes a day’, Lenin had become Stalin’s prisoner. His two main secretaries, Nadezhda Alliluyeva (Stalin’s wife) and Lydia Fotieva, reported to Stalin everything he said. Lenin was evidently unaware of this, as later events were to reveal. Stalin, meanwhile, made himself an expert on medicine, ordering textbooks to be sent to him. He became convinced that Lenin would soon die and increasingly showed open contempt towards him. ‘Lenin kaput,’ he told colleages in December. Stalin’s words reached Lenin through Maria Ul’ianova. ‘I have not died yet,’ her brother informed her, ‘but they, led by Stalin, have already buried me.’ Although Stalin based his reputation on his special relationship with Lenin, his real feelings towards him were betrayed in 1924, when, having had to wait a whole year for him to waste away and die, he was heard to mutter: ‘Couldn’t even die like a real leader!’ Actually, Lenin might have died much sooner. Towards the end of December he became so frustrated with the restrictions on his activities that he once again requested poison so that he could end his life. According to Fotieva, Stalin refused to supply the poison. But he no doubt soon came to regret it, since in the brief spells when he was allowed to work Lenin now dictated a series of notes for the forthcoming Party Congress in which he condemned Stalin’s growing power and demanded his removal.36

These fragmentary notes, which later became known as Lenin’s Testament, were dictated in brief spells — some of them by telephone to a stenographer who sat in the next room with a pair of earphones — between 23 December and 4 January. Lenin ordered them to be kept in the strictest secrecy, placing them in sealed envelopes to be opened only by himself or Krupskaya. But his senior secretaries were also spies for Stalin and they showed the notes to him.37 Throughout these last writings there is an overwhelming sense of despair at the way the revolution had turned out. Lenin’s frenzied style, his hyperbole and obsessive repetition, betray a mind that was not just deteriorating through paralysis but was also tortured — perhaps by the realization that the single goal on which it had been fixed for the past four decades had now turned out a monstrous mistake. Throughout these last writings Lenin was haunted by Russia’s cultural backwardness. It was as if he acknowledged, perhaps only to himself, that the Mensheviks had been right, that Russia was not ready for socialism since its masses lacked the education to take the place of the bourgeoisie, and that the attempt to speed up this process through the intervention of the state was bound to end up in tyranny. Was this what he meant when he warned that the Bolsheviks still needed to ‘learn how to govern’?

Lenin’s last notes were concerned with three main problems — with Stalin in each as the principal culprit. The first of these was the Georgian affair and the question of what sort of union treaty Russia should sign with the ethnic borderlands. Despite his own Georgian origins, Stalin was the foremost of those Bolsheviks whom Lenin had criticized during the civil war for their Great Russian chauvinism. Most of Stalin’s supporters in the party were equally imperialist in their views. They equated the colonization of the borderlands, the Ukraine especially, by Russian workers, and the suppression of the native peasant population (‘petty-bourgeois nationalists’), with the promotion of Communist power. As the Commissar for Nationalities, Stalin proposed in late September that the three non-Russian republics that had so far come into being (the Ukraine, Belorussia and Transcaucasia) should join Russia as no more than autonomous regions, leaving the lion’s share of power to the federal government in Moscow. The ‘autonomization plan’, as Stalin’s proposals came to be known, would have restored the ‘Russia united and indivisible’ of the Tsarist Empire. It was not at all what Lenin had envisaged when he had assigned to Stalin the task of drawing up the plans for a federal union. Lenin stressed the need to pacify what he saw as the justified historical grievances of the non-Russians against Russia by granting them the status of ‘sovereign’ republics (for the major ethnic groups) or ‘autonomous’ ones (for the smaller ones) with broad cultural freedoms and the formal right — for whatever that was worth — to secede from the union.

Stalin’s plans were bitterly opposed by the Georgian Bolsheviks, whose attempts to build up their own fragile political base depended on the concession of these national rights. Already, in March 1922, Stalin and his fellow-Georgian, Ordzhonikidze, head of Moscow’s Caucasian Bureau, had forced Georgia, much against its leaders’ will, to merge with Armenia and Azerbaijan in a Transcaucasian Federation. It seemed to Georgia’s leaders that Stalin and his henchman were treating Georgia as their fiefdom and riding roughshod over them. They rejected the autonomization plan and threatened to resign if Moscow forced it through.fn3

It was at this point that Lenin intervened. To begin with he took Stalin’s side. Although his proposals were undesirable — Lenin forced them to be dropped in favour of the federal union that later became known as the Soviet Union Treaty ratified in 1924 — the Georgians had been wrong to issue ultimatums and he told them so in an angry cable on 21 October. The next day the entire Central Committee of the Georgian Communist Party resigned in protest. Nothing quite like it had ever happened before in the history of the party. From late November, however, when Lenin was generally beginning to turn against Stalin, his position changed. New evidence from Georgia made him think again. He despatched a fact-finding commission to Tiflis, headed by Dzerzhinsky and Rykov, from which he learned that during the course of an argument Ordzhonikidze had beaten up a prominent Georgian Bolshevik (who had called him a ‘Stalinist arsehole’). Lenin was outraged. It confirmed his impressions of Stalin’s growing rudeness and made him see the Georgian issue in a different light. In his notes to the Party Congress on 30–1 December he compared Stalin to an old-style Russian chauvinist, a ‘rascal and a tyrant’, who could only bully and subjugate small nations, such as Georgia, whereas what was needed from Russia’s rulers was ‘profound caution, sensitivity, and a readiness to compromise’ with their legitimate national aspirations. Lenin even claimed that in a socialist federation the rights of ‘oppressed nations’, such as Georgia, should be greater than those of the ‘oppressor nations’ (i.e. Russia) so as to ‘compensate for the inequality which obtains in actual practice’. On 8 January, in what was to be the final letter of his life, Lenin promised the Georgian opposition that he was following their cause ‘with all my heart’.38

Lenin’s second major concern in his Testament was to check the growing powers of the party’s leading organs, which were now under Stalin’s control. Two years earlier, when his own command had been supreme, Lenin had condemned the proposals of the Democratic Centralists for more democracy and glasnost in the party; but now that Stalin was the great dictator Lenin put forward similar plans. He proposed to democratize the Central Committee by adding 50 to 100 new members recruited from the ordinary workers and peasants in the lower organs of the party. To make the Politburo more accountable he also suggested that the Central Committee should have the right to attend all its meetings and to inspect its documents. Moreover, the Central Control Commission, merged with Rabkrin and streamlined to 300 or 400 conscious workers, should have the right to check the Politburo’s powers. These proposals were a belated effort (similar in many ways to Gorbachev’s perestroika) to bridge the widening gap between the party bosses and the rank and file, to make the leadership more democratic, more open and efficient, without loosening the party’s overall grip on society.

The final issue of Lenin’s last writings — and also by far the most explosive — was the question of the succession. In his notes of 24 December Lenin voiced his worry about a split between Trotsky and Stalin — it was partly for this reason that he had proposed to enlarge the size of the Central Committee — and, as if to underline his preference for a collective leadership, pointed out the faults of the major party leaders. Kamenev and Zinoviev were compromised by their stand against him in October. Bukharin was ‘the favourite of the whole Party, but his theoretical views can only be classified as Marxist with reserve’. As for Trotsky, he ‘was personally perhaps the most capable man in the present Central Committee, but he has displayed excessive self-assurance and shown excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of work’. But it was for Stalin that Lenin’s most devastating criticisms were reserved. Having become the General Secretary, he had ‘accumulated unlimited power in his hands, and I am not sure that he will always know how to use this power with sufficient caution’. On 4 January Lenin added the following note:

Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealings between Communists, becomes intolerable in a General Secretary. For this reason I suggest that the comrades think about a way to remove Stalin from that post and replace him with someone who has only one advantage over Comrade Stalin, namely greater tolerance, greater loyalty, greater courtesy and consideration to comrades, less capriciousness, etc.39

Lenin was making it clear that Stalin had to go.

Lenin’s resolve was further strengthened at the start of March, when he learned about an incident which had taken place between Stalin and Krupskaya several weeks before but which had been kept secret from him. On 21 December Lenin had dictated to Krupskaya a letter to Trotsky congratulating him on his successful tactics in the battle against Stalin over the foreign trade monopoly. Stalin’s informers told him of the letter, which he seized upon as evidence of Lenin’s ‘bloc’ with Trotsky against him. The next day he telephoned Krupskaya and, as she herself put it, subjected her ‘to a storm of coarse abuse’, claiming she had broken the party’s rules on Lenin’s health (although the doctors had authorized her dictation), and threatening to start an investigation of her by the Central Control Commission. When she put the phone down, Krupskaya apparently went pale, sobbed hysterically and rolled around on the floor. Stalin’s reign of terror had begun. When Lenin was finally told about this incident, on 5 March, he dictated a letter to Stalin demanding that he should apologize for his ‘rudeness’ or else risk a ‘breach of relations between us’. Stalin, who had become completely arrogant with power, could hardly mask his contempt for the dying Lenin in his ungracious reply.fn4 Krupskaya, he reminded him, ‘is not just your wife but my old Party comrade’. In their ‘conversation’ he had not been ‘rude’ and the whole incident was ‘nothing more than a silly misunderstanding … However, if you consider that for the preservation of “relations” I should “take back” the above words, I can take them back, although I fail to understand what all this is supposed to be about, or where I am at “fault”, or what, exactly, is wanted of me.’40

Lenin was devastated by the incident. He became ill overnight. One of his doctors described his condition on 6 March: ‘Vladimir Ilich lay there with a look of dismay, a frightened expression on his face, his eyes sad with an inquiring look, tears running down his face. Vladimir Ilich became agitated, tried to speak, but the words would not come to him and he could only say: “Oh hell, oh hell. The old illness has come back.” ’ Three days later Lenin suffered his third major stroke. It robbed him of the power to speak and thus to contribute to politics. Until his death, ten months later, he could only utter single syllables: ‘vot-vot’ (‘here-here’) and ‘s’ezd-s’ezd’ (‘congress-congress’).41

In May Lenin was moved to Gorki, where a team of doctors was placed at his disposal. On fine days he would sit outside. There a nephew found him one day ‘sitting in his wheelchair in a white summer shirt with an open collar … A rather old cap covered his head and the right arm lay somewhat unnaturally on his lap. [He] hardly noticed me even though I stood quite plainly in the middle of the clearing.’ Krupskaya read to him — Gorky and Tolstoy gave him the most comfort — and strove in vain to teach him how to speak. By September, with the help of a cane and a pair of orthopaedic shoes, he was just able to walk again. Sometimes he pushed his wheelchair round the grounds. He began to read papers sent from Moscow and, with Krupskaya’s help, learned to write a little with his left hand. Bukharin visited in the autumn and, as he later told Boris Nikolaevsky, found Lenin deeply worried about who was to succeed him and about the articles he could not write. But there was no question of him ever returning to politics. Lenin, the politician, was already dead.42

*

Getting Lenin out of the way was just what Stalin needed. Through his spies Stalin had learned of Lenin’s secret letter to the Twelfth Party Congress. If he was to survive in office, he had to prevent it from being read out there. On 9 March Stalin used his power as the General Secretary to put off the Congress from mid-March until mid-April. Trotsky, although he stood to gain most from Stalin’s likely downfall at the Congress, readily agreed to its delay. He even reassured Kamenev that, whilst he agreed ‘with Lenin in substance’ (i.e. on the Georgian question and party reform), he was ‘for preserving the status quo’ and ‘against removing Stalin’ provided there was a ‘radical change’ of policies. Trotsky concluded with the hope that: ‘There should be no more intrigues but honest co-operation.’ The outcome of this ‘rotten compromise’ — just what Lenin had warned him not to make — was that the Party Congress witnessed Stalin’s triumph rather than his final defeat. Lenin’s notes on the nationality question and the reform of the party were distributed among the delegates, discussed, and then dismissed by the leadership. Most of the delegates, in any case, probably shared the view expressed by Stalin that at a time when unity was needed in the party above all else there was no need to waste time discussing democracy. The urge to silence Trotsky, and all criticism of the Politburo, was in itself a crucial factor in Stalin’s rise to power.43 Lenin’s notes on the question of the succession, including his demand that Stalin be removed, were not read out at the Congress and remained suppressed until 1956.fn5

It is difficult to explain Trotsky’s conduct. At this crucial moment of the power struggle, when he could have won a major victory, he somehow engineered his own defeat. Among the forty members of the new Central Committee, elected at the Congress, he could count only three supporters. Perhaps, sensing his growing isolation, especially after Lenin’s stroke, Trotsky had decided that his only hope lay in trying to appease the triumvirate. His memoirs are filled with the conviction that he had been brought down by a conspiracy of its three leaders. There was certainly a very real danger that, if he had opted to defy them, Trotsky would have been accused of ‘factionalism’ — and after 1921 this was a political death sentence. But there is also some truth in the claim that Trotsky lacked the stomach for a fight. There was an inner weakness to his character, one that stemmed from his pride. Faced with the prospect of defeat, Trotsky preferred not to compete. One of his oldest friends tells the story of a chess game in New York. Trotsky had challenged him to a game, ‘evidently considering himself a good chess player’. But it turned out that he was weak and, having lost the game, went into a temper and refused to play another game.44 This small episode was typical of Trotsky: when he came up against a superior rival, one who was able to out-manœuvre him, he chose to retreat and sulk in glorious isolation rather than lose face by trying to confront him on disadvantageous terms.

This was, in a sense, what Trotsky did next. Rather than fight Stalin in the highest party organs he took up the standard of the Bolshevik rank and file, posing as the champion of party democracy against the ‘police regime’ of the leadership. It was a desperate gamble — Trotsky was hardly known for his democratic habits and he ran the deadly risk of ‘factionalism’ — but then he was in desperate straits. On 8 October he addressed an Open Letter to the Central Committee in which he accused it of suppressing all democracy within the party:

The participation of the party masses in the actual formation of the party organization is becoming increasingly marginal. A peculiar secretarial psychology has been established in the past year or so, its main feature is the belief that the [party] secretary is capable of deciding every and any question, without even knowing the basic facts … There is a very broad stratum of party workers, both in the government and party apparatus, who completely abnegate their own party opinion, at least as expressed openly, as if assuming that it is the apparatus of the secretarial hierarchy which formulate party opinion and policy. Beneath this stratum of abstainers from opinion lies the broad party masses, for whom every decision already comes down in the form of a summons or command.

Support for Trotsky came from the so-called ‘Group of 46’ — Antonov-Ovseenko, Piatakov and Preobrazhensky were the best known — who also wrote in protest to the Central Committee. The climate of fear in the party was such, they claimed, that even old comrades had become ‘afraid to converse with one another’.45

Predictably, the party leadership accused Trotsky of instigating a dangerous ‘platform’ which could lead to the creation of an illegal ‘faction’ in the party. Without responding to his political criticisms, the Politburo issued a vicious personal attack on Trotsky on 19 October. Trotsky was arrogant, considered himself above the day-to-day work of the party, and acted by the maxim ‘all or nothing’ (i.e. ‘Give me all or I’ll give you nothing’). Four days later Trotsky addressed a defiant rebuttal of the charges of ‘factionalism’ to the Plenum of the Central Committee. On 26 October he appeared at the Plenum itself.

Until recently it was thought that Trotsky had not attended this crucial meeting. Deutscher and Broué, his two main biographers, both have him absent with the flu. But he did attend and, indeed, put up such a powerful defence that Bazhanov, Stalin’s secretary, who was charged with transcribing Trotsky’s speech, buried the records of it in his personal files. They were found there in 1990. Trotsky’s speech was a passionate denial of the allegations of ‘Bonapartism’ which he claimed had been levelled against him. It was at this point that he raised the question of his Jewish roots. To prove that he lacked ambition Trotsky cited two occasions when he had turned down Lenin’s offer of high office — once in October 1917 (Commissar of the Interior) and once again in September 1922 (Deputy Chairman of Sovnarkom) — on the grounds that it would not be wise, given the problem of anti-Semitism, to have a Jew in such a high post. On the first occasion Lenin had dismissed this as ‘trivial’; but on the second ‘he was in agreement with me’.46 Trotsky’s implication was obvious: opposition to him in the party — and Lenin had acknowledged this — stemmed partly from the fact that he was a Jew. It was a tragic moment for Trotsky — not just as a politician but also as a man — that at this turning point in his life, standing condemned before the party, he should have to fall back on his Jewish roots. For a man who had never felt himself a Jew, it was a mark of how alone he now was.

Trotsky’s emotional appeal made little impression on the delegates — most of whom had been picked by Stalin. By 102 votes to two the Plenum passed a motion of censure against Trotsky for engaging in ‘factionalism’. Kamenev and Zinoviev pressed for Trotsky to be expelled from the party; but Stalin, always eager to appear as the voice of moderation, thought this was unwise and the motion was rejected.47 Stalin, in any case, had no need to hurry. Trotsky was finished as a major force and his expulsion from the party — which finally came in 1927 — could await its time. The one man capable of stopping Stalin had now been removed.

*

The public had not been told that Lenin was dying. Right until the end the press continued to report that he was recovering from a grave illness — one from which any mortal man would have died. By inventing this ‘miracle recovery’ the regime sought to keep alive the cult of Lenin upon which it now increasingly depended for its own sense of legitimacy. The term ‘Leninism’ was used for the first time in 1923: the triumvirate sought to present themselves as its true defenders against Trotsky, the ‘anti-Leninist’. The same year saw work commence on the first edition of his collected works (the Leninskii sbornik), the holy scriptures of this orthodoxy, and the establishment of the Lenin Institute (formally opened in 1924), complete with an archive, a library and a museum of Leninania. There was a spate of hagiographies whose main aim was to create myths and legends — Lenin as a poor peasant, or a worker, Lenin as the lover of animals and children, Lenin as the tireless worker for the people’s happiness — which might help to make the regime more popular. It was also from this time that huge portraits of Lenin began to appear on the façades of public buildings — one Moscow park even had a ‘living portrait’ of him made up of bedding plants — while inside many factories and offices there were ‘Lenin Corners’ with approved photographs and artefacts to illustrate his achievements.48 As Lenin the man died, so Lenin the God was born. His private life was nationalized. It became a sacred institution to consecrate the Stalinist regime.

Lenin died on 21 January 1924. At 4 p.m. he had a massive stroke, fell into a deep coma and died shortly before 7 p.m. Apart from his family and attendant doctors, the only witness to his death was Bukharin. In 1937, pleading for his own life, he claimed that Lenin had ‘died in my arms’.49

The announcement was made by Kalinin the next day to the delegates of the Eleventh Soviet Congress, which was then in session. There were screams and sobbing noises from the hall. Perhaps because of its unexpectedness, the public showed signs of genuine grief: theatres and shops closed down for a week; portraits of Lenin, draped in red and black ribbons, were displayed in many windows; peasants came to his rest home at Gorki to pay their last respects; thousands of mourners braved the arctic temperatures to line the streets of Moscow from the Paveletsky Station to the Hall of Columns, where Lenin’s body was brought to lie in state. Over the next three days half a million people queued for several hours to file past the bier. Thousands of wreaths and mournful declarations were sent by schools and factories, regiments and naval ships, towns and villages throughout Russia. Later, in the months following the funeral, there was a mad rush to erect monuments and statues of Lenin (one in Volgograd had Lenin standing on top of a giant screw), and to rename streets and institutions after him. Petrograd was renamed Leningrad. Whole factories pledged to join the party — one agitator said that this ‘would be the best wreath on the coffin of the deceased leader’ — and in the weeks following his death 100,000 proletarians were signed up in this so-called ‘Lenin enrolment’. Many Western journalists saw this ‘national mourning’ as a ‘post-mortem vote of confidence’ in the regime. Others saw it as a cathartic release of collective grief after so many years of human suffering. People sobbed hysterically, hundreds fainted, in a way that defies rational explanation. Perhaps it shows that the cult of Lenin had already cast its spell: that however much they may have hated his regime the people still loved the ‘Good Lenin’, just as in the old days they had despised the boyars but loved the ‘Father Tsar’.

Lenin’s funeral took place on the following Sunday in arctic temperatures of minus 35° centigrade. Stalin led the guards of honour who carried the open coffin from the Hall of Columns to Red Square, where it was placed on a wooden platform. The Bolshoi Theatre orchestra played Chopin’s Funeral March, followed by the old revolutionary hymn, ‘You Fell Victim’, and the Internationale. Then, for six hours, column after column, in all an estimated half a million people, marched past the coffin in gloomy silence, lowering their banners as they passed. At precisely 4 p.m., as the coffin was slowly lowered into the vault, sirens and factory whistles, cannons and guns, were sounded across Russia, as if letting out a huge national wail. On the radio there was a single message: ‘Stand up, comrades, Ilich is being lowered into his grave.’ Then there was silence and everything stopped — trains, ships, factories — until the radio broadcast once again: ‘Lenin has died — but Leninism lives!’

In his will Lenin had expressed the wish to be buried next to his mother’s grave in Petrograd. That was also the wish of his family. But Stalin wanted to embalm the corpse. If he was to keep alive the cult of Lenin, if he was to prove that ‘Leninism lives’, there had to be a body on display, one which, like the relics of the saints, was immune to corruption. He forced his plan through the Politburo against the objections of Trotsky, Bukharin and Kamenev. The idea of the embalmment was partly inspired by the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922. Lenin’s funeral was compared in Izvestiia to those of ‘the founders of the great states in ancient times’. But it probably owed as much to Stalin’s Byzantine interpretation of the Russian Orthodox rites. Trotsky, who was horrified by Stalin’s plan, compared it to the religious cults of the Middle Ages: ‘Earlier there were the relics of Sergius of Radonezh and Serafim of Sarov; now they want to replace these with the relics of Vladimir Ilich.’ At first they tried to preserve Lenin’s body by refrigeration. But it soon began to decompose. A special team of scientists (known as the Commission for Immortalization) was appointed on 26 February, five weeks after Lenin’s death, with the task of finding an embalming fluid. After working round the clock for several weeks, the scientists finally came up with a formula said to contain glycerine, alcohol and other chemicals (its precise composition is still kept a secret). Lenin’s pickled body was placed in a wooden crypt — later replaced by the granite mausoleum which exists today — by the Kremlin wall on Red Square. It was opened to the public in August 1924.50

Lenin’s brain was removed from his body and transferred to the Lenin Institute. There it was studied by a team of scientists, charged with the task of discovering the ‘substance of his genius’. They were to show that Lenin’s brain represented a ‘higher stage of human evolution’. It was sliced up into 30,000 segments, each stored between glass plates in carefully monitored conditions, so that future generations of scientists would be able to study it and discover its essential secrets. The brains of other ‘undisputed geniuses’ — Kirov, Kalinin, Gorky, Mayakovsky, Eisenstein and Stalin himself — were later added to this cerebral collection. They formed the beginnings of the Institute of the Brain, which still exists in Moscow today. In 1994 it publicized its final autopsy on Lenin: his was a perfectly average brain.51 Which just goes to show that ordinary brains can sometimes inspire extraordinary behaviour.

*

What would have happened if Lenin had lived? Was Russia already set on the path of Stalinism? Or did the NEP and Lenin’s last writings offer it a different departure? Historians should not really concern themselves with hypothetical questions. It is hard enough to establish what actually happened, let alone to prophesy what might (or in this case might not) have happened. But the consequences of Lenin’s succession are perhaps large enough to warrant a few words of speculation. After all, so much of the history of the revolution has been written from the perspective of what happened inside Stalin’s Russia that one may well ask whether there was any real alternative.

On the one hand it seems clear that the basic elements of the Stalinist regime — the one-party state, the system of terror and the cult of the personality — were all in place by 1924. The party apparatus was, for the most part, an obedient tool in Stalin’s hands. The majority of its provincial bosses had been appointed by Stalin himself, as the head of the Orgburo, in the civil war. They shared his plebeian hatred for the specialists and the intelligentsia, were moved by his rhetoric of proletarian solidarity and Russian nationalism, and on most questions of ideology were willing to defer to their Great Leader. After all, they were the former subjects of the tsars. Lenin’s last struggle for the ‘democratic’ reform of the party was never likely to succeed in its attempt to change this basic culture. His proposed reforms were purely bureaucratic, concerned only with the reform of the internal structure of the dictatorship, and as such were incapable of addressing the real problem of the NEP: the strained political relationship between the regime and society, the unconquered countryside in particular. Without a genuine democratization, without a basic change in the ruling attitudes of the Bolsheviks, the NEP was always doomed to fail. Economic freedom and dictatorship are incompatible in the long term.