PART FOUR DEFENCE OF THE REVOLUTION

There’s nothing else I have.

Lenin in 1922

22. WAR LEADER 1918–1919

By most criteria there were few politicians less suited to fighting the Civil War than Lenin. As the eldest son of a widow, he had not been liable for service in the Imperial armed forces; and he made no secret of his military inexperience.1 Certainly he had read Clausewitz’s classic work On War. But the notes he took were peculiar. The conclusion Lenin drew from Clausewitz about the waging of war was that it was becoming an ever simpler technical matter. He did not expect complication. After his party assumed power, he left the practical details to others and did not go near the Red Army. Lenin carried his black Browning revolver with him for considerations of personal security. But he did not fire it. The closest he came to soldierly activity was on his hunting expeditions with his rifle outside Moscow, when he shot ducks and foxes. But this was the extent of his personal direct violence. His experience of large-scale armed conflict between one set of human beings and another had always been at second hand; and he had next to no foresight about the intensity of the Civil War that was exploding across the former Russian Empire.

Yet in at least one sense he was prepared for war. Quiet and inexperienced though he was, Lenin felt no inhibition about giving orders to use military force and the resultant bloodshed gave him no sleepless nights. The writer Maxim Gorki asked him how he knew how much force to use. Lenin, in Gorki’s opinion, was too ready to deploy the Cheka and the Red Army. But Lenin was unrepentant: ‘By what measure are you to gauge how many blows are necessary and how many are superfluous in the course of a particular fight?’2 For Lenin, the winning of the fight was the important thing. Only pedants were concerned about the careful calibration of violence. Lenin preferred to overdo the blows than to risk letting an opponent survive assault.

As a war leader, moreover, he developed very quickly even though he was distant from the military campaigns. By all accounts, he was the linchpin of the Bolshevik central party machine. Trotski as People’s Commissar for Military Affairs won the public plaudits as the party leader in closest contact with the Red Army. He had his own vehicle, which quickly came to be known as the Trotski Train, for travel to the war fronts. He addressed commissars and commanders and rank-and-file troops with panache. There were others who had wonderful talents. Bukharin was an expeditious editor for Pravda. Kamenev could handle the municipal administration for Moscow, Zinoviev for Petrograd. Stalin could run the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities Affairs and any other organisation requiring a firm, decisive hand. Sverdlov, Lenin’s right-hand man in the Kremlin, had the capacity to co-ordinate not only the Party Secretariat but also the Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets. They all of them could exercise power with competence. They had sharp intelligence and an abundance of confidence.

Indeed they raged to amplify their power and to change the world around them in accordance with their doctrines. The year after the October Revolution had been a terrible lesson to them. Persuaded by Lenin in 1917 that the soviets could constitute the core of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, they had found the experience of government less than totally satisfactory. In doctrine they were Marxists of Lenin’s type. They worshipped orderliness, discipline, centralism, hierarchy and monolithic unity. They wanted their commands to be executed without attenuation. They aimed to impose their will mercilessly. Each of them let his subordinates know that results were expected to arrive fast. The Bolshevik central leadership had taken power so as to hasten a transformation of the political and economic world. The reality of power, however, was different. The Russian Empire had broken asunder. The economy and the administration had fallen apart. Politics had given way to chronic, indecisive military struggle. Impoverishment, hunger and disease were becoming normal. And in this situation the Bolsheviks knew that a fully centralised system of order was required. Practical as well as doctrinal exigency was at work.

The Bolshevik central and local leaders were themselves in part to blame for the disorderliness. Each of them wanted the Revolution on his or her terms. The vertical line of command was a shambles in soviets, trade unions and other public bodies. When Lenin wrote to the Astrakhan communists, he had to threaten (or at least he felt he had to threaten) to kill them in order to secure compliance. The central public bodies were in constant disagreement with each other. Lenin could usually get his way with any of them. But he was the October Revolution’s leader: it would have been a pretty poor job if his personal authority had not carried some weight. Others in the Central Committee and Sovnarkom had a harder time. Personal jealousies and institutional rivalries were acute. Nor was the situation improved by the Bolshevik proclivity for establishing new bodies whenever an existing state body could not surmount a specific difficulty. Functional demarcation between institutions had been ridiculed by Lenin in The State and Revolution as a middle-class trick to disguise the reality of the ‘bourgeois dictatorship’ established under capitalism; and he and his party were staggered by the chaotic nature of administration after 1917.

Lenin called on his associates to work harder and, in some cases, to set a better example. The disputes between Trotski and Stalin infuriated him. Each of them wrote to him putting his case; the mutual hatred was naked. Lenin alone could effect an accommodation of sorts. He was not averse to playing the stern father to the party. When the sailors’ leader Pavel Dybenko was put under arrest for insubordination, Lenin took his wife Alexandra Kollontai aside: ‘It’s precisely you and Dybenko who should be setting an example to the broad masses who are still so far from understanding the new Soviet power – you who enjoy such popularity.’3 He released Dybenko only if Kollontai stood as the personal guarantor of his future good behaviour. No one but Lenin could have succeeded with Kollontai like this.

But the solutions he proposed to Bolsheviks were expressed very abstractly. He called for centralism, order, discipline and – increasingly – punishment. The theorist of organisation had never been very good at precise organisational advice. Even in What Is to Be Done? he had been loath to get down to details; and when he did, as in his ‘Letter to a Comrade about our Organisational Tasks’, he had tended towards a rather schematic set of recommendations. At any rate in late 1918, as he convalesced, he did not give much attention to pressing organisational matters. Instead he wrote a booklet to counteract what the party’s enemies had written about him. He had one enemy especially in mind: Karl Kautsky. Out at the sanatorium he composed Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade. For the first time in his career he did not write in longhand. His recuperation took some weeks, and even Lenin had to content himself with dictating his thought to a Sovnarkom secretary, Maria Volodicheva. The inner Lenin revealed himself. Despite his personal and political woes, what did he think it most important to do? To refute Kautsky, a theorist whose existence was completely unknown to the vast majority of the citizens of the Soviet republic, and who was not even the major Marxist leader in Germany.

His words were unexceptional by Lenin’s standards, except for their bluntness. The various verbal evasions of 1917 were put behind him. He mocked Kautsky’s rejection of the desirability of ‘dictatorship’, and declared:4

It’s natural for a liberal to talk generally about ‘democracy’. A Marxist will never forget to pose the question: ‘for which class?’ Everyone knows – and the ‘historian’ Kautsky knows it too – that the uprisings and even the strong cases of unrest among slaves in antiquity instantly exposed the essence of the ancient state as a dictatorship of slave-owners. Did this dictatorship eliminate democracy among slave-owners, for them? Everyone knows this not to be true.

And so Lenin reaffirmed the precept that his socialism, which he thought to be the sole genuine form thereof, could be introduced only though dictatorship. He pressed the argument directly: ‘Dictatorship is the power relying directly upon force unbound by any laws.’5

Yet he continued to be coy about the influences upon his thought. He mentioned Marx, Engels and Plekhanov, but practically no one else. Not once did he mention his admiration for the agrarian-socialist terrorists. Nor did he advertise another influential figure for him: the fifteenth-century writer Niccolò Machiavelli. Whereas Marx had written about the need for dictatorial repression, Machiavelli spelled out how to repress effectively. But having got himself into trouble in 1902 by praising the Russian narodniki, Lenin did not wish to associate himself with a thinker who for centuries had been notorious for promoting amoral techniques of rule; and when Lenin mentioned him in confidential correspondence, as in a letter to Molotov in 1922, he did not refer to Machiavelli by name but as ‘one wise writer on matters of statecraft’.6 Machiavelli, he confided to Molotov, ‘correctly said that if it is necessary to resort to certain brutalities for the sake of realising a certain political goal, they must be carried out in the most energetic fashion and in the briefest possible time because the masses will not tolerate the prolonged application of brutality’. So much for the idea that Lenin was always trying to limit the brutal nature of his regime. In fact he wanted the brutality to be as intense as possible in the short term so that it might not need to be unduly extended in time.

Although we do not know when Lenin read Machiavelli, it is clear that that he was an admirer. There were several other authors he studied after the October Revolution. A few of them are known to us. Among them was John Maynard Keynes, whose treatise on The Economic Consequences of the Peace denounced the Treaty of Versailles. In this case Lenin was open about the influence; for Keynes castigated the territorial and economic dispositions made by the Allies in 1919. He also read Osvald Spengler’s Decline of the West. Spengler wrote that Western capitalism was doomed because of the natural cycle of civilisation from birth to life and then death. Lenin did not like the book, preferring an economic and political explanation for the doom that he too anticipated for the principal market economies; he said that Spengler was a bourgeois whinger.7 Evidently when Lenin read for pleasure, it could frequently be the pleasure of caustic contempt.

In general, though, his intellect was engaged by concerns nearer to home. He focussed his efforts on sustaining the Soviet dictatorship against the attacks of White armies and foreign expeditionary forces. The solution chosen by the Central Committee and supported by the local party bodies was that a single supreme organ should head the Soviet state, decide policies and regulate their implementation. This, they believed, would eliminate the chaos and indiscipline. The organ they selected was their own party.

There is controversy as to why this happened. All Soviet and most Western historians have suggested that it resulted from a deeply laid scheme stretching back to What Is to Be Done? in 1902.8 Yet it strains credulity – now that we can get at archival sources and scholars have looked for ‘dirt’ on Lenin wherever it may be found – that if the Bolsheviks had been planning a specific institutional form of state they would not have left evidence in their letters and memoirs. But such evidence has not come to light. Certainly Lenin was the founder of the one-party, mono-ideological state, but his sketches had been vague on crucial practicalities. What he had articulated was really a set of basic assumptions. He praised leadership and professed a capacity for infallible policies; he also believed in the need for a vanguard party. This was not yet a prescription for the Bolshevik party to become the supreme organ of the Soviet state. But the pressure of events pushed Lenin and his comrades to elaborate their assumptions and move towards this institutional invention within a year or so of the October Revolution. Those assumptions about revolutionary strategy started to count seriously in 1918–19. Policies changed; assumptions were modified in details, but not fundamentally.

Not only Lenin and the Central Committee but the local party leaders were content with the transformation of politics. In January 1919 the Central Committee, most of whose members were frequently absent from Moscow in fulfilment of military or political duties, set up two small inner subcommittees: the Political Bureau (Politburo) and Organisational Bureau (Orgburo). The Central Committee, the Politburo and the Orgburo were empowered to take charge of the highest affairs of state. Despite being party bodies, they were really the supreme agencies of state and their decisions were mandatory for Sovnarkom, the Council of Labour and Defence and the People’s Commissariats.

Lenin belonged to the Central Committee and Politburo and retained his post as Chairman of Sovnarkom and the Council of Labour and Defence. No one else had quite so steady a presence in the Kremlin. The only possible exception was Sverdlov, who was both Central Committee Secretary and Chairman of the Soviet Central Executive Committee, and it was Sverdlov who directed state affairs when Lenin was shot on 30 August 1918. As soon as Lenin recovered, Sverdlov resumed his position as Lenin’s right-hand man in Moscow. The dominance of Lenin and Sverdlov was such that their critics – and even some of their friends – described their rule as a duumvirate. Sverdlov was an imperious little man with an improbably deep voice and a penchant for dressing from head to toe in black leather; his energy seemed boundless. But on 16 March 1919 he died suddenly after a brief attack of ‘Spanish’ influenza. Deprived of a loyal adjutant, Lenin gave an impassioned eulogy at his graveside. Lenin and Sverdlov had not been friends. They spent no time relaxing in each other’s company, and Lenin did not show much regard for Sverdlov’s intellectual capacity or political understanding. But as an organiser, Sverdlov had been outstanding. He was irreplaceable and Lenin knew how much he was going to miss him.

In ensuing years he tried out a series of substitutes for Sverdlov in the Central Committee: Stasova in 1919, Krestinski, Serebryakov and Preobrazhenski in 1920, Molotov and others in 1921 and – most fatefully – Stalin in 1922. All except Stalin were more subordinate to Lenin than Sverdlov had been. In the frequent absences of Trotski, Stalin and Zinoviev, there was great latitude for Lenin as an individual to grasp the main levers of the central party and governmental machines.

His confident manipulation of the levers is remarkable against the background of a private life that had entered an unsettled phase. After recuperating from the assassination attempt, he returned to full-time political work in the Kremlin on 14 October 1918. In fact he was not in good health. He was suffering from his old problems of headaches and insomnia. He had coped by taking walks around the Kremlin’s pathways at midday and midnight. His personal guards, who had no knowledge of his medical history, found this rather maddening since he could easily have been targeted by another gunman. Worse still, he disliked being surrounded by them and sometimes deliberately broke away from them.9 Often he invited either Nadya or his sister Maria to join him. He needed to talk to people he could trust – and neither Maria nor Nadya pressed their ideas on him. His other form of exercise was his hunting trips, which he undertook with Bolshevik associates. The People’s Commissars set off to slaughter the wildlife of the Moscow countryside. Lenin had last gone hunting when he was in Siberian exile and he was delighted to have a regular opportunity to go out with his rifle over his shoulder.

Yet the trips were dangerous from a medical viewpoint. On several occasions he felt a tightening round his chest and an acute pain in his legs. His reaction was to think up some excuse to sit down; he mentioned nothing to his shooting partners. Almost certainly he was suffering what are designated as transient ischaemic attacks (or mild heart attacks). Lenin must have been aware of their seriousness since he consulted medical textbooks whenever he had physical problems. The shadow of mortality grew longer. Lenin became ever more impatient to do what he could for the Revolution before he died.

His health was not the sole thing disturbing him. Although Nadezhda Konstantinovna’s memoirs refer to no tension between husband and wife, the external signs suggest a different story. When Lenin moved out to the Gorki sanatorium, she did not go with him.10 This would be explicable as feminist self-assertiveness if other things had not pointed to Nadezhda Konstantinovna’s disgruntlement. It must be of some significance that among the first visitors to Lenin’s bedside after the assassination attempt in August 1918 had been Inessa Armand.11 Inessa was then working in Moscow as a state functionary for the province’s economy and lived not far from the Kremlin. Her arrival in the Kremlin can hardly have been wonderful news to Nadezhda Konstantinovna. In late 1918 only a few persons could visit him and always they had to have an invitation or his prior permission. Lenin and Inessa had seen something of each other after the October Revolution since he had specifically asked that she should be invited to attend Sovnarkom sessions. Yet there is no evidence that Lenin resumed his affair with her (although this cannot be excluded). His days had been packed with work. What is more, he and Inessa were not in accord over politics; like most leading Bolsheviks, she had been thoroughly hostile to Lenin’s campaign for the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. But their friendship transcended politics, and, when Lenin lay prostrate with bullet wounds, he wanted her by his bedside.

Meanwhile Nadya’s Graves’s disease and her heart palpitations were bothering her, and soon after Lenin returned to the Kremlin she departed for the park in the Sokolniki district on the city’s north-eastern edge; she stayed at her own request in a school where she was allocated a small first-floor room.12 Her treatment remained in the hands of Professor Gete, the family doctor for both the Lenins and the Trotskis.13 She stayed there through December and January. It was an odd move from a medical standpoint since the doctors could have more conveniently treated her if she had not left the apartment she shared with her husband and sister-in-law. Why, then, did she go? It may be that she needed a break from the busy routines of the Kremlin and that Professor Gete did not mind travelling out to examine her. But there are other possibilities. If indeed Nadya was shaken by Lenin’s request to see Inessa after the shooting, perhaps Nadya simply decided to find some tranquillity by herself. She may have thought that by isolating herself she would provoke Lenin into some deeper appreciation of her as his wife and lifelong companion-in-arms.

This is as far as reasonable speculation can take us. Lenin, Nadya and Inessa did not leave further clues about their feelings at that time. Or, if they did, such clues have been lost to history. Nor should it be forgotten that, whatever the nature of Lenin’s relationship with Inessa Armand in 1918–19, his preoccupation in life was still with politics. Making and consolidating the Revolution remained his supreme passion.

In any case, he kept a sense of marital obligation to Nadya and she in turn was gratified by his visits to her in Sokolniki. Usually he would arrive in the evening after work, accompanied by his sister Maria and driven by Stepan Gil.14 On Sunday, 19 January 1919 this was very nearly the cause of his death. Lenin, who had had been asked by the children of the Sokolniki school to attend a fir-tree party, set out from the Kremlin with Maria, Gil and his current bodyguard I. V. Chebanov. When they reached the Sokolniki Chaussée, they heard a sharp whistle. It was already dark; into the snow-laden road leaped three armed men who commanded Gil to halt the car. Gil thought them to be policemen and he obeyed the order. (In mid-1918 he had ignored such an order and the police had fired at the car!) Quickly Lenin showed them his documents. But the men forced him and the other passengers out of the vehicle, put a gun to Lenin’s temples and searched his pockets. Lenin remonstrated: ‘My name is Lenin.’ But they took no notice. The passengers still did not understand that the men were not policemen, and Maria asked to see their documents. The reply came back: ‘Criminals don’t need documents!’ The thieves stole Lenin’s Browning revolver and sped off in the car. Chebanov’s only positive accomplishment was to save the can of milk they were bringing for Nadezhda Konstantinovna.

They trudged to the offices of the Sokolniki District Soviet, where Lenin had difficulty in convincing the clerk that he really was Lenin. Eventually the Soviet’s chairman and his deputy appeared, and recognised Lenin. Thus Lenin and his group arrived late at the children’s fir-tree party. On the same evening Dzierżyński organised a police hunt. The car was found after the robbers ran it into a snowdrift. A Red Army soldier and a policeman lay dead by the side of the vehicle: this could easily have been the fate of Lenin and his partners. Dzierżyński intensified the hunt. The robbers were detected and interrogated. They argued that they had misunderstood what Lenin had said to them. Instead of ‘Lenin’, they had heard ‘Levin’. But, having made their escape, they re-examined the documents and recognised who their victim really was. Their audacity was extraordinary. One of them, Yakov Koshelnikov, wanted to return immediately and kill Lenin. He calculated that the blame would be placed on counter-revolutionaries. There might even, Koshelnikov fantasised, be a coup d’état and he argued that in such a situation there would be no manhunt for the robbers. His fellow gang members, however, rejected his advice. Lenin was luckier than he knew at the time.15

Yet Lenin and the other central Bolshevik leaders could not help but recognise the fragility of the state’s rule over Russia. Biographies in the past have tended to overlook this. If a gang of three desperadoes in the capital could casually ponder whether to go back and assassinate the head of the government, things had come to a pretty pass. Indeed they had always been at a pretty pass and were not to undergo improvement until after the Civil War. Chaos and confusion in the meantime was the norm.

Over the winter of 1918–19 there were several attempts to straighten out the crooked corners of the state’s institutions. By and large, Lenin had the support of officialdom of his party in this process. Soviets, party committees, trade unions and factory-workshop committees were brought to account by a central party and government apparatus that no longer felt inhibited by the need to consult with ‘the localities’. The Party Central Committee and Sovnarkom pressed for all institutions to behave in a more obedient, orderly, military-style fashion. The need for this had become acute in November 1918. Until then the Red Army had been fighting against forces assembled by the Socialist-Revolutionary ministers of Komuch in Samara, and Trotski had been able to report several successes. Kazan was retaken on 10 September. The Komuch army, despite having been strengthened by the Czechoslovak Legion, was no match for the Reds. But in the meantime other armies had been formed to invade central Russia. These were led not by socialists but by former Imperial Army officers who detested not only Bolshevism but also socialism in general, as well as most kinds of liberalism. In southern Russia a Volunteer Army had gathered under the leadership of Generals Alexeev and Kornilov. In mid-Siberia there was another anti-Bolshevik contingent led by Admiral Kolchak. In Estonia, General Yudenich was putting together yet another. The military threat that had been posed by Komuch was about to be intensified.

Once again, neither Lenin nor the rest of the Central Committee had any presentiment of this. Until then one anti-Bolshevik force seemed much like any other. But on 18 November 1918 Admiral Kolchak’s high command arrested the Socialist-Revolutionaries in Omsk and proclaimed Kolchak as Supreme Ruler of All Russia. The objective of this White Army was to move rapidly through to the Urals and then into central Russia. As they came to the strategically important Urals city of Perm in December, a desperate defence was expected. Instead the Bolshevik party and the local Soviet regime fell apart. In the ensuing winter months a triumphant Kolchak looked close to taking Lenin’s place in the Kremlin.

Lenin’s reaction to the Perm disaster showed up his weaknesses in this initial period of the Civil War. He had a matchless knowledge of the mechanisms of the supreme state agencies. He saw to it, too, that he stayed in touch with popular feelings by means of his trips around Moscow and his audiences with peasant petitioners from the provinces (even though he ruthlessly trampled on such feelings whenever he felt that considerations of either Marxist ideology or Realpolitik should take precedence). But Lenin had little appreciation of the enormous chaos of the regime lower down the administrative hierarchy from the Kremlin. Sitting in his office, he could rely on the phones working. He could order books from libraries and read the day’s papers on the morning of publication. He could count on personal assistants and secretaries to do whatever he wanted of them, and he never wanted for food, clothing and shelter. He did not live sumptuously in the Kremlin; but by the standards of party, government and army officials outside Moscow he was a pretty protected, not to say pampered, leader. His isolation from provincial reality dissuaded him from blaming any setbacks on his own policies or upon the inherent difficulties of politics in the regions. Instead he chastised individuals. Always they were judged too weak, too stupid or too dissolute. In the case of the military débâcle at Perm, Lenin simply concluded that one of the main local officials, M. M. Lashevich, had been drunk on the job.16

But Lenin himself was coming in for fierce criticism by lower party and governmental officials. They wanted a tighter hierarchy inside the Soviet state than currently existed, and accused Lenin of tardiness in imposing it. In short, they demanded that the central political leadership should properly centralise the state administration. Some insisted that this process should be accompanied by provisions for democratic accountability within both the party and the soviets. These critics became known as the Democratic Centralists and were led by N. Osinski and T. D. Sapronov. Another group of disgruntled local officials could not care less whether democratic accountability – even in the extremely limited form proposed by the Democratic Centralists – was secured. They simply wanted the state machinery to function reliably. Among such critics was Lazar Kaganovich. Osinski, Sapronov and Kaganovich went on carping at Lenin and Sverdlov from their different standpoints.

These were not the only criticisms of policy. Trotski, with Lenin’s consent, had introduced Imperial Army officers into the Red Army. To each of them he attached a political commissar to keep watch over their loyalty; and for good measure he took hostages from their families who would pay with their lives for any acts of treachery. But Trotski did not stop at that. He shot political commissars, too, if they disobeyed orders. He lined up regiments of deserters and carried out the Roman punishment of decimation. He scorned the notion that long-standing Bolshevik party officials should have no special treatment in the Red Army. For many Bolsheviks in the armed forces, this was insufferable and they demanded military reform. Some of them even argued that Trotski, who had not been a Bolshevik before 1917, might emerge from the armed forces like Napoleon Bonaparte in the French Revolution and become dictator. Lenin tried to avoid the controversy for as long as possible. But inside the party a so-called Military Opposition – inspired behind the scenes by Stalin, Trotski’s bitter enemy – demanded the sacking of the former Imperial Army officers. Only when it came to a definitive choice between the continuation of the policy and Trotski’s resignation did Lenin agree to arbitrate; and by and large he backed Trotski rather than lose him as People’s Commissar of Military Affairs.

Other changes of policy were made in that terrible winter. On 2 December the committees of the village poor were scrapped after it was found that they caused more harm than benefit to the party in the countryside. Peasants basically disliked the divisiveness introduced by the committees. Moreover, it frequently occurred that the committees harassed not just the richer households but the ‘middle peasantry’ that, as Lenin had repeatedly declared, the party wanted to keep on its side. The abolition of the committees was notable in a couple of ways. The first was that Lenin dropped the policy without acknowledging that the mistake in introducing it had been principally his own. He did not often admit to past error, and this occasion was no exception. Secondly, it was evident that the committees of the village poor, despite being unpopular with the peasantry, remained congenial to party officials. Lenin had to convince his party of the practical need to avoid alienating popular opinion by too rapid and coercive a movement in the direction of socialist measures. Not for the last time.

The need for him to react speedily to situations was at a premium. Abroad the Great War drew abruptly to a close on the western front on 11 November when the Central Powers were compelled, after the failure of their massive summer offensive, to sue for an armistice. Britain, France, Italy and the USA had triumphed. Lenin’s instant reaction was to abrogate the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The eight months of the ‘obscene peace’ were at an end. Lenin could at last demonstrate to his critics in the party that he was genuinely committed to ‘European socialist Revolution’. Finance, political propaganda (including a German translation of The State and Revolution) and envoys were rushed from Moscow to Berlin. The assumption was that military defeat had brought about a revolutionary situation; neither Lenin nor the rest of the Central Committee were concerned about the potential response of the Western Allies. The priority had to be the promotion of a far-left socialist seizure of power in Germany. Such an achievement would, thought Lenin, make for a political ‘block’ between Russia and Germany that no army in the world could overthrow. The main problem was that no communist party yet existed in Germany. Instead Lenin would have to work through the Spartacus League headed by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, and with this in mind he initiated moves to convoke a founding meeting of a Communist International. The European revolutionary political offensive would require careful preparation.

Yet the German government after Wilhelm II’s abdication was constituted by leaders of the German Social-Democratic Party who utterly disapproved not only of Lenin and the October Revolution but also of Liebknecht and Luxemburg. The Spartacus League had long ago abandoned hope in the German Social-Democratic Party. Liebknecht and Luxemburg went their own way and planned insurrection. Yet even this could not bring unconditional comfort to Lenin. For Liebknecht and Luxemburg were not exactly admirers of Lenin. In particular, Luxemburg had written criticising Leninist agrarian policy (too easy upon ‘petit-bourgeois’ peasants), national policy (too indulgent to the non-Russians) and policy on government (disgracefully anti-democratic). If the Spartacus League succeeded, then the Bolsheviks in Russia might well encounter problems both in the rest of Europe and in Russia. But if it failed, what would be left of the strategic prognosis of Bolshevism?

Things turned out badly for the Spartacists. On 6 January 1919 they attempted to overturn the socialist government in Berlin. The Defence Minister Gustav Noske mobilised every available anti-communist unit, including troops recently demobilised from the western and eastern fronts. The Spartacus League was hopelessly outgunned. Liebknecht and Luxemburg were captured and butchered and their bodies were deposited outside the Zoological Gardens. This was a disaster for international communism, but Lenin lost no sleep over it. At least, he foresaw, there would be greater freedom than he had expected in the organisation of the Third International; and since he continued to assume that the German working class was culturally superior to Russian workers he had no doubt that a successful socialist revolution would anyway soon occur in Berlin. The practical snag was that communist parties did not exist outside Russia. Lenin would have to draw delegates from far-left organisations that had yet to align themselves with the policies of the October Revolution. He would also have to surmount the travel problems that many such delegates would encounter at a time when Soviet Russia had no diplomatic relations with the outside world.

The end of the Great War also had consequences in Russia’s borderlands. Since the signature of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty a great western swathe of the former Russian Empire had lain outside the proclaimed sovereignty of Sovnarkom. The withdrawal of the German forces gave Lenin his opportunity to invade this region and set up organs of ‘Soviet power’. The Red Army, aided by local volunteers, made rapid progress; and, at Lenin’s insistence, it did not incorporate the region into the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic but established independent Soviet republics in Estonia, Lithuania and Belorussia, Latvia and Ukraine. The Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic would have ties with each of them on a bilateral and equal basis.

The establishment of a growing number of independent Soviet republics was not welcomed by many leading Bolsheviks, especially those who had been brought up in the borderlands and who had been drawn towards Bolshevism precisely because of its commitment to eradicating nationalism. Independent Soviet republics appeared to them – and several of the most articulate among them were Jews who felt especially vulnerable to the anti-semitism of the region’s nationalists – as yet another dereliction of universal socialist values. Lenin, of course, was partly Jewish by ancestry. But he had not had a youth scarred by negative national discrimination. He had been brought up as a Russian European and had campaigned on this platform as a politician, and he hated any manifestations of what he called Great Russian chauvinism. His background enabled him to take a more detached standpoint on ‘the national question’ than most of his colleagues. National and ethnic sensitivities in the borderlands, he insisted, had to be respected. His party was aghast at this; but he tried to explain that he was taking precautions against the independent Soviet republics being able to behave independently. The communist parties in the republics would be treated as mere regional organisations of the Russian communist party and its Central Committee. Real power would thus be held not in the ‘independent’ Soviet republics but in Moscow.

Over the winter of 1918–19 the mood in the Bolshevik Central Committee was schizophrenic. Europe was again on the boil, and the possibility of a European socialist revolution was in the thoughts of all central party leaders. Yet to the east there was cause for intense worry. Kolchak was rampaging further towards Moscow from Perm. There might well soon be Soviet republics in Warsaw, Prague and Berlin. But would socialism survive in the cities of the October 1917 Revolution?

As the First Congress of the Third International (Comintern) opened in the Kremlin precinct on 2 March 1919, Lenin stressed the imminence of Revolution in Europe. It was an unprepossessing gathering for an organisation that was aimed at changing the face of world politics. Out of thirty-four voting delegates, all but four were already resident in Russia. Lenin and his associates had picked people who came from other countries and then given them a mandate to speak on behalf of the entire far left. The French revolutionary grouping represented in Moscow anyway had only twelve members across all France. Lenin had got up to this sort of trick often enough before the Great War at Bolshevik meetings that he defined as meetings of the entire party. But the First Comintern Congress was even more brazenly organised under Bolshevik auspices. The German representative Hugo Eberlein protested against manipulation, but was cajoled into accepting a fait accompli; he was made to feel that otherwise he would spoil the general mood of enthusiasm. Lenin added to the embarrassment by reading out a letter purporting to come from the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies in the English Midlands. This was poppycock, and it is quite likely that Lenin knew it. But it had the necessary effect: the Comintern Congress applauded the magnificent ‘news’ and looked forward to the expansion of the socialist Revolution to the west of Russia.

Once the pleasantries had been completed, the Bolshevik leadership stepped forward with a series of draft resolutions that confirmed their dominance of the proceedings. Lenin spoke on ‘bourgeois democracy and the dictatorship of the proletariat’. His argument was that the civic freedoms that existed in capitalist countries were enjoyed exclusively by the middle classes; and Lenin and succeeding Bolshevik speakers – Bukharin, Zinoviev, Osinski and Trotski reinforced the message that Kautskyite hopes of effecting a socialist transformation in Europe by largely parliamentary methods were doomed to failure. Not even Lenin pushed his luck too hard. He barely referred to Marx, Engels and Marxism, to communism, to civil war or to the role and internal organisation of the party. This omission was no coincidence. The Bolshevik leadership’s objective at the First Comintern Congress was to obtain consent to the founding of the new organisation and to secure control over it in the immediate future. Having got agreement to a generally anti-parliamentary strategy, Lenin and his fellow leaders would later be able to impose further details of ideology and tactics. The Comintern’s foundation may have been organisationally ramshackle, but the consequences for the world over the next couple of decades were immense. A body with pretensions to undermining global capitalism had been created, and every political trend to the right of communism learned to recognise the threat posed from Moscow.

Quite how the threat would be realised was as yet unclear. Not even Lenin had accurate information or instincts about the current developments in world politics. Some of his prognoses were so awry that they were kept permanently out of the various editions of his collected speeches. A striking example is the funeral oration he delivered at the Volkovo Cemetery in Petrograd on 13 March 1919 after the death of his brother-in-law Mark Yelizarov:17

France is preparing to hurl herself upon Italy, they haven’t shared the booty [from the Great War]. Japan is arming herself against America… The working masses of Paris, London and New York have translated the word ‘soviets’ into their own languages… We’ll soon see the birth of the World Federal Soviet Republic.

Few things were more unlikely than a Franco-Italian war. Japan was distrustful of the USA, but hardly in belligerent mood. Nor in truth did French, British and American workers translate Russian vocabulary; instead they kept words like ‘soviets’ in their transliterated form as if wishing to emphasise the exotic nature of what they were reading about Russia in their newspapers. Lenin was not just trying to cheer his supporters. He was in a genuinely elevated mood, and let his imagination and ideology take over from cool judgement.

He was brought down to earth in the same month at his own party’s Eighth Congress. There was hardly a policy that was not controversial among leading Bolsheviks. Lenin and the Central Committee were applauded for convoking the Comintern Congress, but for precious little else. The opening report was given by Lenin himself, who was greeted by shouts of ‘Long live Ilich!’ He gave no opening to any critic past or present. The Brest-Litovsk Treaty had been right. The establishment of the ‘committees of the village poor’ had been right (even though they had had to be abolished). The use of Imperial Army officers had been right. The creation of independent Soviet republics had been right. The Central Committee had done its bit and any faults were to be attributed to those who carried out the policies, not the policy-makers. If there were problems, they had not arisen in Moscow: ‘Organisational activity has never been a strong side of Russians in general and the Bolsheviks in particular, and in the meantime the main task of the proletarian revolution is precisely an organisational task.’ Lenin was attempting to throw back all the problems in the face of his critics. Either they failed, out of ignorance, to understand the wisdom of the policies or they fell short as implementers of the wise measures. The Central Committee could not be faulted.

This was quite a claim. The Bolsheviks had traditionally been seen as the most ideological and most tightly organised of Russian political bodies. They had come into existence in 1903 precisely because of their rejection of amateurism in the organisational life of the party in the Russian Empire, and Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? had been their cardinal factional text. The reality had always been different: the Bolsheviks had usually been as chaotic and ill-disciplined as any other Russian political party until the last few months. Yes, Lenin was trying to obviate criticism of the Central Committee. But also he was blurting out what he genuinely felt in general terms. He adhered to an ethnic hierarchy in his revolutionary politics. For him, Germans were culturally superior to Britons and French, who in turn were superior to Finns; and, of course, Finns had a distinct edge over the Russians. Lenin was experiencing constant frustration from the country he now found himself in. It did not help that a civil war was raging; but he knew that, even without the fighting, he would find Russia a terrible place in which to make a revolution.

Thus the young Lenin who wanted to turn Russia into a ‘European’, ‘Western’ country had not faded away. At the Comintern Congress he had played up the Russian theme: the Bolsheviks had started a socialist revolution and the other Europeans had to agree to model themselves on the Russians. At the Eighth Party Congress he chastised the Bolsheviks for being too Russian. The result was a wrangle: several of his critics were fellow leaders who had been his co-speakers at the Comintern Congress. Lenin in his turn was attacked by Osinski for running the party and government on the principles of an amateur; he was also accused by Bukharin of insufficient radicalism in drafting the Party Programme. On and on it went. The granting of state independence to Finland was described as a fiasco since Lenin’s expectation had been thwarted that a Finnish Soviet republic would result. By then Lenin was having such a hard time that he opted to let others defend Trotski on the matter of the Red Army’s organisation. Yet he could not entirely avoid debate, and when the discussion began in a secret Congress, Lenin not only defended Trotski but also chastised Stalin for the excessive military losses on the southern front. As party leader he would impose himself.

On nearly every main policy he got his way. He had to compromise a little on the ‘military question’; he also had to find an equivocal set of words on the ‘national question’: his slogan of ‘the freedom of secession for nations in reality’ was too much for most delegates. But he got his way more successfully on the ‘agrarian question’. The Congress agreed that the middling sections of the peasantry should be indulged. Possibly it helped, too, that news of the outbreak of a Hungarian socialist revolution was delivered towards the end of the proceedings. Lenin rose to the occasion. Raising his fist, he strutted forward to the edge of the platform and – with all the force of his lungs – he assured the audience:

‘We are convinced that this will be the last heavy half-year.’ He noted that international imperialism had not yet been defeated. But he was unworried. ‘This wild beast’, he affirmed, ‘will perish and socialism will conquer throughout the world.’

23. EXPANDING THE REVOLUTION April 1919 to April 1920

In the year and a half after the October Revolution the Bolsheviks had laid the foundations for a unique state that lasted in Russia for seven decades and was the model for communist regimes covering a third of the inhabited world after the Second World War. There was a single ruling party. There was a politically subordinate legislature, executive and judiciary. The party in reality was the supreme state agency and Lenin in all but name was the supreme leader of that agency.

Not everything was yet in place. The party had not thoroughly subordinated the other state agencies. In some respects it did not try to. Once the Politburo had fixed the personnel appointments and the strategy, the Red Army operated without interference; and the Cheka, which had been protected by Lenin since its creation, was criticised but never seriously punished for its frequent ‘excesses’. Thus the state was not as tightly co-ordinated as Leninist political doctrines demanded. Furthermore, there were several aspects of the later one-party state that had not been introduced. As yet there was no decision on the permanent constitutional interrelationship of the various Soviet republics. There was no comprehensive plan for dealing with the former upper social classes once the Civil War had been won. Nor had the party’s strategy been fixed for the creation of a new socialist culture, for conditions of work, remuneration and recreation and even for the long-term role of the party in the one-party state. Wide gaps existed in Leninist theory about dictatorship, democracy, social justice and human rights. Even though the general architecture of the state had already been established, much about the Soviet order had yet to be elaborated.

It was unclear in spring 1919 that the building would stand much longer. The Whites were still confident that their cause would prevail in Russia and that they would soon drive the Reds from the Kremlin. This was not the only civil war at the time. There was another Russian civil war, waged on a local basis, between the Russian peasantry on one side and any army – whether Red or White – in the vicinity. In each borderland of the former Russian Empire there were also civil and ethnic wars. But Lenin was preoccupied by one of these wars: the war waged by his Red Army on three great, moving fronts against the White forces of Kolchak, Denikin and Yudenich. The Red commanders assumed that, if and when this war had been won, they would easily proceed to victory in the others; and the Politburo under Lenin added that such a victory would constitute only the preface to chapters of further revolutionary expansion in central and western Europe.

But could they win the Civil War in Russia? Lenin’s prophecy in March 1919 that Bolsheviks would have only one ‘last heavy half-year’ was only a little over-optimistic. The military campaigns went in favour of the Reds. Admiral Kolchak’s advance into central Russia was held up in April, and Ufa in the southern Urals fell back into the Red Army’s hands in June. Lenin goaded his leading political commissars and generals relentlessly. Always he demanded greater effort and ruthlessness. He predicted doom unless instant success could be obtained. To the Revolutionary-Military Soviet preparing an offensive against Kolchak from its temporary base in Lenin’s native town Simbirsk, he telegraphed: ‘If we don’t conquer the Urals before the winter, I consider the death of the Revolution inevitable. Concentrate all the forces.’1 From a strategic standpoint this was nonsense: there was no conclusive reason to believe that Kolchak had to be defeated by late autumn. But Lenin wanted to incite his subordinates. He so much liked the phrase about the death of the Revolution that he used it in another telegram on the same day to leading commissars on an entirely different front, in Kiev over five hundred miles to the south-west of Moscow.2

The city of Perm, where the Reds had been ignominiously defeated in December 1918, was retrieved in July 1919, and Kolchak fled into mid-Siberia, never to return. Kolchak’s primacy among the White commanders had been recognised by Anton Denikin in southern Russia. Denikin was ready to begin his own assault on the Red heartland in July 1919. He did this by splitting his forces. One wing was sent across the Don Basin, the other northwards up the river Volga. Denikin’s strategy was uncomplicated. He issued a Moscow Directive to move in a straight line as fast as possible towards the capital. The recent defeat of Kolchak freed the Reds to strengthen their defence. In summer 1919 they drove Denikin back into Ukraine. The news was greeted with huge acclaim in the Kremlin. Until the battles in northern Russia there had been a distinct possibility that Denikin would succeed where Kolchak had failed. But Lenin’s delight was given no public display. The Bolshevik Central Committee and Sovnarkom held no celebration. He devoted no speech or article to the event. War was not like Marxist theory or economic policy. War was something to be won, but not theorised – and perhaps theorising anyway would have made winning less likely.

Winning, for Lenin, was everything. After his recovery from the August 1918 assassination attempt, his personal assistant Bonch-Bruevich persuaded him to have a short film made in the Kremlin precinct. The aim was to prove that he was still alive. It was not all that interesting a performance by Lenin and Bonch-Bruevich:

The scene: Lenin and Bonch-Bruevich stand near a tree inside the Kremlin precinct.

The paraphernalia: Lenin appears wearing his three-piece suit while Bonch-Bruevich, obviously a softy, appears in a raincoat.

The action: Lenin and Bonch-Bruevich talk together, and Bonch puts him at his ease so that Lenin is seen offering a lively reaction to something said by Bonch.

The conversation: The contents of the conversation are not known.

The film had a negligible impact. Everyone who might have attended the cinema in the Civil War was scrabbling after food and fuel, and Russian cinemas were short of the equipment they needed to put the Sovnarkom Chairman on screen. Lenin anyway could not relax in front of the moving-action camera; the conversation with Bonch-Bruevich was nowhere near as gripping for an audience as films taken of Kerenski boarding trains and waving at crowds in 1917. Lenin had no such inhibition about photographs, to which he was more accustomed. After seizing power, he had initially forbidden these to be taken of him, a prohibition resulting not from shyness but from a pragmatic judgement about propaganda. In July 1917 he had had to shave off his beard, and only began to grow it again on 25 October 1917. Not till January 1918, when he again felt happy about the way he looked, did he allow an official photographer to get near him. Although he did this in the interests of publicising his party and its policies, he took no expert advice. The whole business of propaganda remained amateurish for several years and each party leader did things his own way.

Nevertheless there was an appreciation of Lenin’s unique importance as party leader and increasingly he was singled out for special attention in Pravda. The campaign to erect a political cult of him began in earnest after the attempt on his life in August 1918. Zinoviev wrote a biography of him. Articles appeared in party and government newspapers. Posters were pasted up. No Bolshevik – apart from Trotski in the Red Army – was accorded such individual acclaim as Lenin.

The image was of a selfless leader brought low by humanity’s enemies. The party’s writers described him as an authentic son of Russia and a fighter for material improvements, for enlightenment and for peace. Lenin appeared as a Soviet Christ: superhuman powers were attributed to him. His survival was ascribed to a miracle; the writers did not bother to explain how to reconcile this with their militant atheism. All manner of nastiness was attributed to his assassins. There was a story that the bullets had been tipped with a deadly poison used on the arrows of South American Indians. Another tale suggested that the Allies had been the instigators of the attack. Ludicrous as this was, the counter-propaganda of the anti-Red forces was no nearer to the truth. The posters and printed handouts of the Whites were forerunners of German Nazism. In them, Lenin appeared as a demonic entity. Usually he was represented alongside Trotski as co-leader of an international Jewish conspiracy pernicious to both country and world civilisation. Strife, blood, vengeance: these were the inevitable results of Russia’s having fallen victim to Leninism.

Of course, Lenin was indeed of part-Jewish ‘ethnic’ descent. He was also truly an internationalist. He really did initiate and aggravate mayhem in Russia and detested most forms of Russian patriotism. And yet the White notion that he was leading a Judaeo-Masonic crusade against Mother Russia was just as preposterous as the Red notion that he was the secular Christ of the Great Socialist Revolution. Whether demonised or sanctified, he was the object of political propaganda. But he did not mind. He took no heed of what the Whites said of him, and although he apparently felt distaste for adulatory remarks made about him in his presence, he was not unduly disconcerted by the Lenin cult in general and did not seek to terminate it.

He must have calculated that the cult would help to consolidate the regime and his position within it. He understood the need to adapt his political message to his surroundings and knew that most Russians, being either peasants or people who had left the villages only recently, were not well informed about public life. The party’s message had to fit the lineaments of the country’s popular culture, as he explained to Maxim Gorki:3

Well, in your opinion, millions of peasants with rifles in their hands: they’re a threat to culture, aren’t they? Do you really think that the Constituent Assembly would have been able to cope with [their] anarchism? You who make such a noise about the anarchism in the countryside ought to understand our work better than anyone. We’ve got to show the mass of Russians something very simple, very accessible to their way of reasoning. Soviets and communism are a simple thing.

Gorki was rather shocked by the revelation that Lenin obviously had a deep suspicion of ordinary Russians. For Lenin, they were like promising children who had yet to go to school. He thought this not just about the party’s enemies – kulaks, priests, merchants, bankers and nobles – but about those whom the party supposedly cherished: the lower social classes.

Although peasants incurred his special ire, even workers could irritate him by sticking to the traditions of the religious calendar. In advance of the summertime feast day of St Nicholas he exclaimed: ‘It’s stupid to be reconciled to the “Nikola” festival. We must get all the Chekas up on their feet and shoot people who don’t turn up for work because of the “Nikola” festival.’4 Lenin explained that similar preventive violence should be prepared for the festivals at Christmas and New Year. Some workers’ friend!

He was at his angriest, needless to say, about the middle and upper classes. For example, he upbraided Zinoviev for trying to prevent Petrograd workers from rampaging around the city’s affluent districts. Another correspondent received the following telegram, and there is hardly anything like it as a justification of repression:5

There can be no avoiding the arrest of the entire Kadet party and its near-Kadet supporters so as to pre-empt conspiracies. They’re capable – the whole bunch – of giving assistance to the conspirators. It’s criminal not to arrest them. It’s better for dozens and hundreds of intellectuals to serve days and weeks in prison than that 10,000 should take a beating. Eh, eh! Better!

There was also an element of sheer pleasure in the terror he wanted to inflict:6

It is devilishly important to finish off Yudenich (precisely to finish him off: give him a thorough beating). If the offensive [by him] has started, isn’t it possible to mobilise 20 thousand Petrograd workers plus 10 thousand bourgeois, place artillery behind them, shoot several hundred and achieve a real mass impact on Yudenich?

This statement was so outrageous that it was kept secret until after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

How on earth were his commanders meant to line up the contingent of victims as Yudenich’s troops bore down on them? Anyway the Red Army high command took the view that what mattered to Lenin were fast military victories and that the armed forces knew best how to obtain these. (Not that this was any excuse for his sadistic self-indulgence.) For a short while, in October 1919, there was panic in Petrograd when Yudenich marched from Estonia. Zinoviev’s nerves were shattered. Even Lenin, despite his suggestion on tactics, queried whether the city could be defended. Trotski enjoyed a rare moment of being able to press for a more confident attitude. The Revolution had to be defended and Petrograd saved. The old capital was the symbol of the Revolution. And so the defences were reinforced. The Red Army, albeit without being proceeded by a screen of middle-class prisoners, dispersed the forces of Yudenich; and as Denikin was simultaneously preparing to evacuate his army from Kiev, it was clear that the Civil War’s crucial battles were over. The Reds had conquered the Russian Empire’s core. Moscow, Petrograd and Kiev were run by Bolshevik administrations.

Foreign military powers were stronger than the Reds, but faced internal obstacles to their armed intervention in Russia. Unrest among their socialist parties was a factor. Although Lenin was by no means popular except with groups on the far left, a reluctance prevailed among socialists to castigate the Bolsheviks unequivocally. The soldiers who had fought and won the Great War did not relish the prospect of fighting the Red Army. The victorious Allies – France, the United Kingdom, the USA and Italy – decided to end their economic blockade of Soviet Russia. Kiev, occupied by Denikin in summer 1919, was taken again by the Reds in December. Where Soviet republics had been established in the winter of 1918–19, they began again to be installed. Lenin searched Europe for a sign that ‘socialist Revolution’ might be expanded westwards. He thought of northern Italy. He looked at the Czech lands, hoped that these might be a bridge across which the Red Army might march into Germany. Temporarily he had to give up hope for Hungary since Béla Kun’s communist state in Budapest had been overrun by counter-revolutionaries in August 1919. But still he wanted to launch a ‘revolutionary war’. He could not imagine that his Soviet republic would survive unless a fraternal socialist party elsewhere seized power and overturned capitalism. Revolution had to be consolidated in Russia and initiated in Europe – the two processes would reinforce each other.

Already Lenin was considering how his party and government might promote post-war reconstruction. Since the October Revolution, and especially since mid-1918, the movement of policy had been unilinear. Less room was left for other parties in which to operate. The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries were hunted. The Socialist-Revolutionaries who had set up the Komuch administration were treated as counter-revolutionaries even though individual members were allowed to join civilian bodies as well as the Red armed forces. The Mensheviks kept a few newspapers going, but were frequently harassed and none of their leaders could count on remaining free. Sovnarkom was running a one-party state in all but name. It operated a virtual monopoly over what could be printed. It declared the fundamental correctness of Marxism. It had formally nationalised the industrial, transport and banking sectors of the economy and introduced massive legal restrictions on private activity in commerce and agriculture. It was starting to offer national and ethnic autonomy to the non-Russians it ruled over, but was intent upon maintaining the old multinational state of the Romanovs intact whatever the opinions of the populace. Such an outcome pleased Lenin. Even when he had not done the drafting, he agreed with the plans.

But how on earth could a case be made for the communist economics of wartime? In fact Lenin, Sovnarkom’s principal theorist, made no attempt at a fundamental defence. In trying to explain his policies in the Civil War, some writers have postulated that he was pushed towards them solely by the unexpected and unpredictable circumstances after October 1917.7 The more traditional Western idea is that they were always his intended policies but had been kept secret until he had power. The likelihood is that neither is true. He had often been warned by the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries about the circumstances that would result from a seizure of power by his party. He chose to ignore the predictions. But in doing so, he operated not so much on the basis of a secret grand plan as upon his general assumptions about Revolution. This enabled him to formulate policies as the situation changed with immense rapidity. When he hugely increased state economic ownership even beyond his specifications before October 1917, he could draw upon a range of operational assumptions. He approved of centralism, governmental control, coercion and class struggle; he hated private profit and longed to crush the social groups which benefited from it. And having witnessed the increase in state powers in the capitalist countries in the Great War, he assumed that the socialist dictatorship should aim at an even greater increase in Russia.

Thus he spoke of the iniquity of kulaks (killing was too good for them) and factory owners and bankers (why shouldn’t they lose their factories and banks to the state?). He argued for the eradication of envy, greed and theft. He argued for a fully socialist economy to be established; and he implied that the current policies would put industry, agriculture, transport and commerce back on their feet. As time went on, moreover, he found the policies more and more congenial. He hoped to prolong them after the Civil War was over.

In this he was a typical Bolshevik of the time. A consensus had been reached about how best to run the party and the state, to transform society and spread the Revolution abroad. Of course, several factions, groupings and individuals breached this consensus. The Democratic Centralists continued to demand that the lower party bodies should be enabled to influence the Central Committee and, increasingly, that the soviets should obtain a degree of autonomy from the party. Another faction, the Workers’ Opposition, went much further. Led by Alexander Shlyapnikov and Alexandra Kollontai, the critics attacked Lenin for failing to abide by his own precepts of 1917. They wanted workers and peasants to exercise greater authority over economic and social life. They called for trade unions and soviets as well as the party to be engaged in politics, and urged a democratisation of political structures. This was an awful affront to Lenin’s Bolshevism as it had developed after the October Revolution. He dealt with it ruthlessly. The factionalists found themselves asked by the Secretariat of the Central Committee to move to jobs outside the main industrial cities of Russia. Democratic Centralist leaders were sent in disproportionate numbers to Ukraine, where they would be unable to unsettle policies in the party as a whole.

There were divergences among the Central Committee members themselves. The trouble came from the factions of the Democratic Centralists and Workers’ Opposition. But there were other less predictable spats. Kamenev and Bukharin complained about the arbitrariness of conduct allowed to the Cheka by Lenin. But by and large Lenin prevented reform; the Cheka proceeded with its Red Terror unimpeded by the need to hand over its victims to the People’s Commissariat of Justice.

Neither Kamenev nor Bukharin believed strongly enough in procedures of jurisprudence to take their arguments further, and Lenin offered Bukharin a small concession: he was given the function of liaising with Dzierżyński, the Cheka Chairman, on the Central Committee’s behalf. But in another dispute in the Central Committee there was, in Lenin’s opinion, no room for compromise. In this instance his adversary was none other than Trotski, whose tour of the military front in the Urals had convinced him that the party’s economic policy had to be changed. In February 1920 Trotski called for a partial repeal of the grain-requisitioning measures. His reasoning was that the campaigns of expropriation by the state created a vicious circle of hoarding by peasants, state violence, reduction of the sown area and peasant rebellions. Instead he proposed that in certain agricultural regions there should be a restriction on the amount of seizable grain. Peasant households, Trotski declared, should be allowed to trade their grain surplus. The circle had to be broken if there was to be an end to the famine, ruin and chaos in the country.

This proposal was phrased in pragmatic terms. Trotski was no more moved to moral indignation on the peasants’ behalf than was any other Bolshevik leader. He was exercised by the threat of agrarian dissolution. Usually Lenin was alive to the need to adjust policy for practical reasons. But not on this occasion. In 1918–19, reacting to the emergency in food supplies, he favoured state monopolies in official economic policy. Throughout the Civil War he claimed that there was no genuine scarcity of grain. Kulak hoarders, he claimed, were the beginning and end of the problem. For this reason he rejected Trotski’s diagnosis. It was a heated meeting of the Central Committee, and Lenin and Trotski criticised each other ferociously. Lenin got so worked up that he accused Trotski of supporting ‘Free Trade’.8 Since this was a policy of nineteenth-century British capitalists, the charge was wounding to Trotski, who did not like being compared to Richard Cobden, Robert Peel and John Bright. Lenin’s words were indeed unjustified, for Trotski was not proposing unrestricted or permanent agrarian reform; he did not even want it to be applied to the whole country. But Lenin was pretty sure of a majority, and triumphed by eleven votes to four.

Usually when Lenin argued in the Central Committee, he kept control of himself. His anger on this occasion may have stemmed from resentment at Trotski’s attempt to prescribe economic policy from his post as People’s Commissar of Military Affairs. Lenin had become accustomed to dominating the civilian agenda. But also he was sure that the party, once it had ascended the summit of state economic ownership, should not climb down. He was in fiery, confident mood. Trotski was not going to be permitted to disturb him or unsettle his policies.

Even Lenin, whose ability to take pragmatic decisions in order to save his party from disaster was legendary, had his own lapses when ideology occluded his vision. Trotski had the advantage of being able to observe provincial Russia on his trips to the war fronts. By contrast Lenin’s experience of the country after the October Revolution was restricted to Moscow, Petrograd and a handful of villages outside Moscow – and he also depended on the letters he received and the oral reports made to him in the Kremlin. But this will not do as an explanation of Lenin’s foolishness in rejecting Trotski’s proposal. Lenin had greater knowledge of Russia’s situation than is usually suspected. Daily he walked in the streets around the Kremlin; when his bodyguards complained about his casual attitude, he chastised them for denying the civil rights of each Soviet citizen to the Chairman of Sovnarkom.9 The streets of the capital were not very different from streets elsewhere. Lenin had frequently observed the beggars, the poor and the hungry. He saw the chaos and disorder. Lenin himself had been shot at. He had been robbed by bandits. He could not even depend on the honesty of the bodyguards assigned to him: on one unforgettable occasion he briefly left his jacket behind in his office and returned to discover that one of his bodyguards had filched his Browning revolver.10

It was a fine dictatorship when the supreme leader was treated contemptuously by his underlings! Lenin had to explode with anger before the revolver was given back. There was a long way to be travelled before most ordinary workers and peasants would learn Marxist tenets and start to act like disciplined socialists. In the Kremlin itself a woman cleaner told Lenin to his face that she did not mind who was in power so long as she got paid.11 But Nadezhda Konstantinovna had a still more dispiriting tale to tell him. A female worker in the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment informed her that she was not going to work that day for no other reason than that workers were the masters now and she personally did not want to work.12 Then there was the time when Lenin and Nadezhda Konstantinovna were crossing a bridge in Moscow. The bridge was in poor repair, and a peasant passer-by remarked that it was a ‘Soviet-style [sovetskii] bridge, if you’ll pardon the expression’.13 Soon Lenin started using ‘Soviet-style’ as a pejorative epithet.14 The lack of conscientiousness in institutions and in daily life annoyed him intensely, and it was a mass phenomenon that he had not predicted before the October Revolution.

His general attitude was not to the liking of Nadezhda Konstantinovna, who was appalled by his refusal to criticise workers for thieving wood from the structure of a state-owned house: ‘You, Vladimir Ilich, think in terms of broad plans. These little matters don’t get to you.’ She used the polite Russian form of ‘you’ – and it is probable that this verbal formality was meant to signal her anger at his complacency.

But Lenin would not yield and reminded her that the workers needed wood for fuel: cold, ignorant men and women were not to be blamed. If workers froze, they would die. But Nadezhda Konstantinovna had had a glimpse of a deeper malaise than he would ever acknowledge. Indeed he had persistently aroused the working class into taking crude, violent action. When fellow Central Committee member Zinoviev tried to restrain attacks on middle-class people in Petrograd, Lenin was incandescent. From Moscow he dispatched a telegram threatening all manner of unpleasantness unless the mayhem were given political sanction again. Lenin the class warrior had an intuition that he needed to keep on supporting the mass expression of social revenge, and he sensed that he needed to maintain the pressure in the Civil War. No class enemy, he suggested, should be allowed to feel safe under Soviet rule. The Cheka by itself could not do everything. Workers, too, had to be let loose. The problem was that he had no plan for staunching the flow of their angry bitterness if ever the Russian Communist Party and the Red Army were to emerge victorious over the Whites.

Lenin assumed that the best way to handle the workers was to keep them under tight control. He thought the same about soldiers, sailors and peasants. According to him, the crucial objective in internal social policy was to secure the prerequisites of economic reconstruction. For this purpose he was willing to postpone the immediate satisfaction of the consumer needs of society. The state’s priority, he declared, was to raise productivity in town and countryside.15 Hunger, disease and homelessness would continue for some time before Sovnarkom would tackle them. First and foremost for Lenin was the need to augment output in agriculture and industry. He was acting entirely within character. As a young man in the 1890s he had looked away when the other revolutionaries, including his elder sister Anna, had drawn attention to the plight of starving Volga peasants. At that time he had argued that the greater good was served by the peasantry’s impoverishment, namely Russia’s industrial development. Now in 1920 he sought macro-economic reconstruction before attempting to feed, cure and shelter the mass of society. And no one in the central party leadership felt differently.

And yet on particular matters he would yield. When, for example, Kollontai approached him with some story of abuse, he would often grant her demand. Then, meeting her at some official assembly, he would enquire: ‘Now what? Are you satisfied? Now that we’ve done such and such.’ Kollontai was not easily quietened. As often as not she would reply along the following lines: ‘Yes, but things are bad for us in that area over there. We’ve let things slip there.’16

It was in this spirit that he supported another of Trotski’s proposals. In January 1920 there seemed to be a serious possibility that military campaigns were about to come to an end. The Reds had beaten the Whites in Russia, and the last White Army – led after Denikin’s resignation in April 1920 by General Vrangel – was organising a last-ditch stand in Crimea. The Red Army’s task in reconquering the other non-Russian regions was not regarded as likely to present undue difficulties. The sole imponderable factor was the international situation. But, so long as the great powers did not intervene, the Politburo could expect to reconstitute the Russian Empire in its preferred socialist form within a short time.

As discussions about military demobilisation were started, Trotski made an unusual suggestion. This was that Red Army conscripts should be transferred into ‘labour armies’ and deployed in the service of economic reconstruction. Under army discipline, they would be more effective than the existing urban workforce in restoring roads, buildings, mines and industrial enterprises to operational efficiency. When Trotski spoke, he gave the impression that the ‘militarisation of labour’ might even become a long-term phenomenon. Lenin endorsed the suggestion. But he did so in more cautious terms, and he took care about his public image. Labour armies were going to be unpopular with the conscripts and their families. They would also be unpopular with existing urban workers, who would perceive that official labour policy was becoming very authoritarian. While agreeing with Trotski that the labour armies would at least help in the short term with vital economic tasks, he took care that his speech on the subject to the Moscow province Party Conference was reported only very sketchily in Pravda. He was aware that both he and his regime were suspect in the eyes of the working class, the conscripts and the peasantry without unnecessarily antagonising them with the disciplinary rhetoric used by Trotski.

Lenin was an ideologue, but he was also a sinuous politician in pursuit of his ideological goals. His handling of the ‘national question’ is a case in point. As Denikin was driven out of Ukraine, Lenin insisted that the Ukrainian Soviet Republic should be re-established. He knew that the Bolsheviks had frail support there. The peasantry hated Reds and Whites equally, and few ethnic Ukrainians had joined the Bolshevik faction before 1917. In order to govern Ukraine it was crucial, as Lenin discerned, to attract political groups that had once been hostile to the Bolsheviks. For this purpose he persuaded the central party leadership to sanction the incorporation of the Borotbists in the Communist Party. This was an extraordinary step. The Borotbists were Socialist-Revolutionaries, and in Russia the Socialist-Revolutionaries were being persecuted by the Bolsheviks. But Lenin did not mind being inconsistent. The Borotbists were mainly ethnic Ukrainians; they were also socialists. They would be able to provide a contingent of Soviet administrators congenial to Ukrainians. Simultaneously Lenin ensured that Jews, who were highly uncongenial to Ukrainian peasants, should be prevented from filling administrative posts in any great number. Ukrainian sensitivities were not to be offended.

Lenin put things as follows to Kamenev: ‘Let us, the Great Russians, display caution, patience, etc., and gradually we’ll get back into our hands all these Ukrainians, Latvians…’17 Thus he wanted to enable the Bolsheviks to continue to pretend that the Ukrainian Soviet Republic was truly independent of Russia and that the bilateral treaty was founded upon equality between the two states. In reality Ukraine’s government would remain strictly under the control of the Russian Communist Party and its central party bodies in Moscow, and the Ukrainian Communist Party would operate as a subordinate and regional party organisation.

These were clever, ruthless politics and Lenin was pleased with the result. He had not been so clever in his reaction to Trotski’s proposal for a reduction in the amount of grain requisitioning, but as yet he did not have to pay the price for his obstinacy. What appeared important to Lenin was that the Reds had survived and triumphed in the Civil War. Their institutions, practices and attitudes had been elaborated in the heat of the military conflict and he assumed that they could be used to win the peace. He was a happy man, and enjoyed himself in the spare moments he had for relaxation. Such moments were very few. The burden of office was immense. Lenin remained at the fulcrum of political business. He chaired the Politburo and the Central Committee. He chaired Sovnarkom. He chaired the Council of Labour and Defence. He kept a watch over the Orgburo and the Secretariat. He was living the Revolution in the most intense way. He was fulfilled. There was no physical threat to the regime that he felt his party, his government and its armed forces could not handle – and the Communist International was building communist parties elsewhere in Europe. The cause to which he had devoted his adult life was being advanced with success.

Just one part of his life was less successful than it might have been. This was the personal corner. His health was no better and the headaches, the insomnia and the heart attacks continued to give him problems. He tried to ignore all this and to get on with his work. But his family was not giving him the support to which he was accustomed. Anna Ilinichna was distracted by grief for her husband Mark Yelizarov, who had died in March 1919. Maria Ilinichna was hard at work as Pravda’s ‘responsible secretary’. Nadezhda Konstantinovna, who had her own room in the Kremlin flat,18 went on a trip to the Volga region for a couple of months from July. Dmitri Ilich arrived from the Crimea just after Nadezhda Konstantinovna’s departure. The brothers had not seen each other for a decade, and went off swimming together in Pakhra Lake near Podolsk. There was a nostalgic aspect to this: in 1897 the Ulyanov family had rented a house in the vicinity while Lenin was in Siberian exile. In 1919, he showed off to Dmitri by refusing to use a towel.19 It was as if they were lads again by the river Sviyaga in Simbirsk. Lenin also relaxed by playing skittles with Nikolai Bukharin even though he habitually lost;20 and he enjoyed riding around Moscow with Anna Ilinichna’s adoptive son Gora Lozgachëv.

But these interludes did not change the basic situation: Lenin was not feeling in the best of sorts either physically or emotionally. And it served him right. Nadya’s trip down the river Volga on the paddle steamer Red Star meant her running the risk of either typhoid or capture by anti-Bolshevik armies or bandits. It would not be a holiday, not by any stretch of the imagination. (Alexandra Kollontai, an adventurous person, had taken the same journey in the previous year and was in no doubt that she had taken an immense risk.)21 Nadya’s purpose was to give speeches to workers and peasants at each port on the way. She could not have given clearer indication that she wanted to get away from Moscow, from the Kremlin and from Lenin. The marriage was almost certainly entering one of its less happy phases. Lenin’s attitude to Inessa Armand was quite possibly among the causes of the malaise. When a terrorist explosion occurred in the Moscow city party headquarters it was Inessa who ran to alert Lenin in person in the Kremlin.22 Inessa remained devoted to him. Perhaps he responded in kind; perhaps not. Yet there may well have been sufficient brusqueness in his attitude to Nadezhda Konstantinovna that she thought she had nothing to lose by leaving for the Volga.

Possibly, too, she thought that he might appreciate her more if she was away from him. If this was her purpose, it was successful. He wrote frequently and affectionately to her and these messages are the only ones that Nadezhda Konstantinovna kept from their long partnership. A few phrases exemplify the tone:23

Dear Nadyushka,

I was very glad to get news from you. I’ve already sent a telegram to Kazan and, not having a reply to it, sent another to Nizhni [Novgorod], and there was a reply from there today… I give you a big hug and ask you to write and telegraph more often.

Yours [Tvoi],

V. Ulyanov

NB: Listen to the doctor: eat and sleep more, then you’ll be completely fit for work by the winter.

Local party officials kept him informed about her progress.24 The news was not good: she was bothered by the heat and mosquitoes and was careless about her recuperation. Out of Lenin’s sight, she was not going to be told how to behave.

Their personal relationship in any case was not the main thing in their lives and never had been. They lived for the Revolution; and when Lenin laid emphasis on her returning to fitness for work, he was expressing a priority that they shared. Both of them were feeling optimistic in general political terms. Yet it would have done Lenin good to join his wife on the Red Star steamship and witness the devastation alongside the river Volga. Moscow, despite its shabbiness, was untouched by military action. This helps to explain why Lenin in the winter of 1918–19 remained so full of confidence. In fact he and his party were facing a number of problems in the time ahead. Power at home was not as secure as he thought. The economy was a shambles. Rebellions by peasants and soldiers were in prospect. Workers’ strikes were already taking place. The spread of the Revolution westwards would not be simple even if an opportunity arose. In April 1920 Lenin agreed to attend a Bolshevik party celebration of his fiftieth birthday. Eulogies were delivered, and he made his embarrassment plain. But obviously he was pleased that the birthday was attended by such joy on the part of his close colleagues. He was about to discover that the general situation of his regime was worse than his eulogists – or indeed he himself – imagined.

24. DEFEAT IN THE WEST 1920

Lenin was acquiring the reputation of a politician whose main aim was to rule Russia rather than make the ‘European socialist Revolution’. Perhaps, it was thought, he was just a modern sort of Russian nationalist leader and his commitment to internationalist socialism had lapsed. This was a profound misperception and it is surprising that it is still widely shared to this day.1

For the newer evidence from archives bolsters the old argument that Lenin’s zeal for spreading the October Revolution was undiminished. Only the vastly superior power of Germany had stopped him in 1918 and the Civil War had prevented him from sending the Red Army abroad when the Germans withdrew at the end of the Great War. Yet it remained Lenin’s fundamental belief that Europe was in need of a revolutionary transformation. He was ready to gamble on offending the victor powers in the Great War – the Allies – by stirring up trouble to the west of Russia. His reasoning had been given in years past and he repeated it in 1920: ‘We’ve always emphasised that a thing such as a socialist revolution in a single country can’t be completed.’2 Lenin, like practically every Bolshevik leader, assumed that fraternal socialist states needed to be established elsewhere in Europe in order that Soviet Russia could bring its socialism to maturity. The prospects for an isolated Russia were pathetic. Territorial integrity and post-war economic enhancement would remain insecure until such time as Europe as a whole joined the side of the Revolution.

Lenin did not mind how this was achieved. As in 1917, he hoped that revolutions would occur without the need for Russian assistance; but he was willing to supply finance, propaganda and political instruction to hasten and strengthen the process. He was still expecting, too, to commit the forces of the Red Army. In confidential discussions he let himself go. ‘As soon as we’re strong enough to cut capitalism down as a whole, we’ll quickly seize it by the throat.’3 Europe remained the key to Lenin’s strategic calculations.

The opportunity for action came unexpectedly. Clashes between Russian and Polish military forces had taken place since the end of the Great War. As the Civil War ended in Russia, the question arose whether the Red Army would be able to control the Russian Imperial borderlands. The Poles had no intention of losing their statehood. Their Commander-in-Chief Josef Piłsudski made an incursion into Ukraine with a plan to annex Ukrainian territory to a federal state based in Warsaw, and he took Kiev on 7 May 1920. Piłsudski was not unknown to Lenin. In 1887 the Okhrana had arrested and exiled him in the course of suppressing revolutionaries after the attempted assassination of the Emperor Alexander III by the terrorist group to which Lenin’s brother Alexander had belonged. Piłsudski indeed had links with the friends of Alexander Ulyanov. After five years in Siberia, Piłsudski returned to lead the Polish Socialist Party. Like Lenin, he announced support for Japan in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5. Like Lenin, too, he had sanctioned armed robbery in order to acquire a treasury for his party (and Piłsudski, a real man of action, led his team in person). Piłsudski and Lenin had lived in the same region of Austrian Poland before 1914. They took coffee in the same café, and Lenin’s Bolshevik faction received help from Piłsudski’s Union of Riflemen in strengthening its security against the Okhrana.

Lenin and Piłsudski had believed that one’s enemy’s enemy could be one’s friend. Both had hated the Romanov dynasty while disagreeing about practically everything else. They surely recognised that they shared a temperamental hardness; they were leaders incarnate. But after assuming power they ignored each other. For Lenin, Piłsudski had become a pawn of Anglo-French imperialism. For Piłsudski, Lenin was no different from the tsars of old. Poland had to be defended, and Piłsudski believed that the federal amalgamation of Poland and Ukraine was the key to Polish security.

In Moscow there was panic. Imperial Army officers who had lain low during the Russian Civil War were summoned by former General Alexei Brusilov to enlist in the Red Army and assist in the liberation of the ‘Motherland’. Steadily the Red Army regrouped itself. Trotski and Stalin were dispatched to the western front to bolster the Bolshevik party’s control, and Piłsudski was forced back into the Polish lands. By then the Polish–Soviet War had become a focus of international diplomatic attention. Negotiations were under way to establish a permanent territorial demarcation and peace. The British Foreign Secretary was involved in drawing up a map satisfactory to both sides.

But then Lenin had a change of mind and decided that the time had come, as Piłsudski retreated, to launch the ‘revolutionary war’ that the Left Communists had demanded of him in 1918. Quite what had convinced him of the attainability of victory is not known. But he had always believed in the ‘ripeness’ of Europe for Revolution and in the efficacy of military means to achieve that result. His immediate scheme was breathtaking in its scope. Poland was meant to be just the first revolutionary prize of war. Then moves should be made to ‘sovietise’ nearby countries, perhaps Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania. As if by afterthought, he suggested that Lithuania might be sovietised in the same campaign. He dreamed, too, that Italian far-left socialists might organise their own revolution in the northern cities of the country.4 The great prize, Germany, should be grasped in the same campaign. Once Warsaw had fallen, the Red Army should burst through into East Prussia and race for Berlin. Lenin anticipated that the Polish and German ‘proletariats’ would welcome the Reds from Russia and rise against their national ‘bourgeois’ governments. As the delegates assembled in Petrograd’s Smolny Institute from all over the world for the Second Congress of the Communist International in summer 1920, Lenin hoped that he would soon be seeing them again as the people’s commissars in their own Soviet-style governments.

Lenin’s colleagues shared his vision, but not his judgement. Unlike him, they had direct experience of the difficulties faced by the Red Army: the overstretched lines of communication and supply, the shoddy equipment, the inadequate rations and the absence of a popular will to prolong the war. Not even Trotski, who had caused him trouble over the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, was in favour of invading Poland; and Bolsheviks of Polish origin warned Lenin that he underestimated the distrust felt by Poles for Russian armies, even armies sent into their country with professed internationalist objectives. But Lenin insisted. The fact that most other leading members of the central party leadership were outside Moscow gave him his chance. No formal session of Sovnarkom, the Central Committee or the Politburo discussed the question of war or peace. There was no repetition of the laborious, disputatious deliberations over Brest-Litovsk in early 1918. Lenin was helped by the fact that there was at least a consensus that Piłsudski had to be taught a lesson. The Red Army was already committed to the pursuit of the Polish armed forces. The borders of Soviet Russia and Poland were as yet unfixed. The reaction of foreign governments remained unclear and Lenin wanted to make the most of the confusion. He prodded his comrades into letting him have his way. Poland ought to be sovietised.

And once the decision was taken, it was given full support by his fellow Bolshevik leaders. There was no repetition of the kind of disputes about ‘revolutionary war’ that had divided the party in 1918. Trotski and Stalin were in the armed forces as they pressed into Poland.

The Second Comintern Congress went ahead while all this was going on. Proceedings began on 19 July 1920 in the Smolny Institute, where Lenin and the Bolshevik Central Committee had been based during the October Revolution. It was the first time Lenin had returned to the city since March 1919 (and it was the last occasion when he visited a Russian city outside Moscow). Lenin’s delegation had travelled there from Moscow’s Nicholas Station on 18 July 1920. The proceedings were heavy with symbolism. The Congress was taking place in the birthplace of the October Revolution. Foreign delegates were shown around the revolutionary sights: the Finland Station, the Kseshinskaya mansion, the Winter Palace and the corridors and hall of the Smolny Institute itself. Naturally it was not beyond the wit of Lenin to think that, if he based the Comintern Congress in Petrograd, he would find it easier to impose Bolshevik party policies on the Communist International. Awed by the surroundings of revolutionary history, the foreign communists would accede to the demands of the only communists who had yet undertaken a successful seizure of state power.

Lenin gave several major speeches and thoroughly enjoyed himself. Strutting up and down on the platform, he repeated his belief that the October Revolution offered a model to the rest of the world’s socialists. Between speeches he squatted on the stairs underneath the aspidistras, drafting his contributions to the Congress. He was fêted whenever he appeared, but he also tried to meet delegates privately. The Congress, he convinced himself, would be the last such assembly to be held in Russia. During the Congress a map of Europe was hung to enable delegates to follow the advance of the Red Army from Ukraine into Poland. Little red flags were pinned to it. There was about to be a ‘European socialist revolution’. The Politburo reinforced the morale of everyone as the Red Army raced towards Warsaw. Lenin suggested that the Italian comrades should return to Milan and Turin and organise revolution.

The Congress was a watershed in communist history. Nearly all the debates were inaugurated by leaders of the Russian Communist Party, and on no point were they blown off course by the foreigners. Lenin and his associates wanted to make Soviet Russia into the model for far-left socialist movements abroad. Communist parties should be formed. Their organisational principles should be centralism, hierarchy, membership selectivity, activism and discipline. The best chance for ‘European socialist revolution’ was for Germans, French and British to copy the methods of Bolshevism. Lenin and his associates had evidently calculated that the establishment of highly centralised parties elsewhere would enable the Politburo, through the Executive Committee of the Comintern, to dominate the new communist parties throughout Europe and the rest of the world.

The proceedings occurred at a hectic pace and in an atmosphere of intense expectancy, and for several days they had to be suspended because of military developments in the Polish–Soviet War. But when the Congress was resumed Lenin stepped forward to offer a trenchant defence of his version of socialism with its reliance on dictatorship and terror. In other ways, however, he suggested that communists had to rethink how socialism might be achieved. In the past he had argued, like all Marxists since the 1890s, that socialism could not be constructed except on the foundations of an existing capitalist society. For Lenin, the Russian economy was already predominantly capitalist before the turn of the twentieth century. In 1920 he quietly dropped this tenet and stated that non-capitalist countries, despite their ‘backwardness’, might be able to bypass capitalism altogether and proceed towards socialism. He introduced these novel ideas in order to encourage communists in colonial countries around the world to throw off the chains of European imperialism. He attempted no detailed justification of his intellectual somersault and did not deign to explain why he had always opposed the Russian narodniki, who had argued that capitalism could be bypassed.

Why should this matter? The main significance lies in the casual fashion in which Lenin treated his Marxism whenever a goal of practical politics was in his sights. Although he thought seriously about social and economic theory and liked to stick by his basic ideas, his adherence was not absolute. In mid-1920 the priority for him was the global release of revolutionary energy. Ideas about the unavoidable stages of social development faded for him. Better to make Revolution, however roughly, than to fashion a sophisticated but unrealised theory. If intellectual sleight of hand was sometimes necessary, then so be it. Even when he stayed close to his previously declared policies, Lenin was mercurially difficult to comprehend. Parties belonging to the Comintern, he declared, should break with ‘opportunistic’ kinds of socialism which rejected the need for the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’; but simultaneously he demanded that British communists should affiliate themselves to the British Labour Party: Lenin’s argument was that communism in the United Kingdom was as yet too frail to set up an independent party.

He got his way at the expense of mystifying the Comintern Congress and irritating the British delegate Sylvia Pankhurst, communist and feminist. Pankhurst might have raised a fuss if all eyes had not been on the map of the war front. Everyone at the Congress concentrated upon the question of how to aid the process of Revolution presently being advanced on the bayonet tips of the Red Army. A Polish Revolutionary Committee was selected by the Politburo from Polish communists known to be implicitly loyal to directives from Moscow. The same was not done with German communists, but this was essentially only a matter of time. The Red Army was the advancing front-line of the Comintern. Socialist governments were expected to dominate the map of the European mainland very soon, and world imperialism supposedly could hardly be much longer in collapsing. Back to Moscow travelled Lenin and his fellow commissars, eager to receive news of further Red successes when they disembarked from the train. He felt that he was on the brink of achieving a lifetime’s ambition. Russia had fallen to him in 1917–18. Europe, country after country, was surely about to succumb to a multinational communist assault, by the Red Army and by ‘local’ communist parties, upon the bastions of continental capitalism.

If Lenin dreamed of heading a European socialist federal regime, he refrained from giving vent to the notion. In general he was very reticent. But among his associates he could not contain himself. All the time he wanted action on the front, action in the rear and even action beyond the lines. His intemperance was extraordinary, as was obvious in a note he scribbled to Trotski’s deputy E. M. Sklyanski: ‘A beautiful plan. Finish it off together with Dzierżyński. Disguised as “Greens” (we’ll heap the blame on them afterwards) we’ll advance 10–20 versts and hang the kulaks, priests, landed gentry. 100,000 rubles prize for each one of them that is hanged.’5 Here was Lenin the class warrior as well as Lenin the excited political schemer: he had listened to the generals long enough, and wanted to add his own ideas. And yet these ideas were not only extremely nasty; they were also not very practical. The Red Army, if it was going to win the war, would conquer Poland by moving its great regiments forward and crushing Piłsudski – and surreptitious viciousness of the kind proposed by Lenin would not make a difference in practice. If anything, the hanging of priests would have turned most Polish citizens against the Reds.

Meanwhile Piłsudski had retreated to Warsaw with the intention of reorganising Polish defences. Trotski, Stalin and the high command had split the Red Army into two great prongs, and Piłsudski had a chance to tackle the invaders outside the Polish capital. Trotski had grave difficulties in co-ordinating his forces, and certainly he could not count on the southern prong – whose commissar was Stalin – being as co-operative as it might have been. In mid-August 1920, Piłsudski offered battle by the river Vistula outside Warsaw. Quite against Lenin’s prediction, the worst happened. The Red Army was severely defeated. As the Poles exploited their advantage, the Soviet forces retreated headlong along the Smolensk road towards Moscow. Lenin had no choice but to sue for peace. One summer day’s battle had ruined everything. No more grandiose predictions about the federal Union of Europe. No more advice on unholy political alliances of far right and far left. No more expression of pride in the invincibility of the Red Army. All that came forth from Moscow was a recognition of the military disaster and the dire necessity of signing a peace on whatever terms were made available.

Lenin had been forcing the pace. He had urged his Politburo colleagues to start thinking how Europe would be organised. If ‘European socialist Revolution’ was about to become a reality, they had to have serious plans. Lenin and Stalin had an exchange of opinions about this, and Stalin never forgot the vehemence with which Lenin argued his case. For Lenin, this would be a simple process. He wanted to form a federal Union of Russia and the various Soviet republics of the former Russian Empire. Whenever a state in central and western Europe acquired a Soviet-style government, it could be admitted to this great, expanding Union. In such a Union there was no scheme for Russian political preeminence and Stalin objected to this as being unrealistic. For him, it was self-evident that neither a Soviet Poland nor a Soviet Germany would enter into a Union founded by Russia. Old national pride would not quickly be erased. And so Stalin proposed that the RSFSR should constitute the core of one great federation while Germany formed another federation. Lenin was shocked by Stalin’s position and accused him of chauvinism.6 The October Revolution had been undertaken with the purpose of ending the division of Europe into separate state blocs. Stalin appeared to wish to maintain the blocs – and Lenin could scarcely believe what he heard from him.

Stalin did not even accept that Russia and Ukraine should enter their own Union on equal terms. Now that the Civil War was nearly over, he wished to scrap the various bilateral treaties and simply incorporate the other Soviet republics into the RSFSR. Of course, not even Lenin wished to provide Ukraine with freedom from control by Moscow; but he felt it politic to preserve the outward trappings of such freedom. Thus the planning for Revolution in Europe became enmeshed in a discussion of the future constitutional arrangements in Russia. Lenin and Stalin wanted to get things straight in advance of the anticipated European socialist Revolution. Their anger with each other in June 1920 only seems comic now because the Red Army was halted outside Warsaw and the socialist revolutions elsewhere either did not happen or soon petered out. But at the time they were in deadly earnest. They saw themselves as not only social engineers in Russia but also master planners for the entire continent. Their acquaintance with foreign leaders in the Communist International inclined them to think that no one could discharge the task as competently.

Yet, while Lenin was castigating Stalin for a betrayal of internationalist principles, he was quietly being criticised by prominent German communists for the same sin. The history of Germany in the past couple of years had taught Lenin not to exaggerate the independent potential of the German political far left. The German Communist Party had been formed at the very end of 1918, and its hold on the German working class was weak. For this reason it could not be assumed that the Red Army’s arrival in Berlin would be sufficient to touch off a successful socialist insurrection. Lenin had a cunning strategic ploy to hand. According to him, Germany had been reduced to colonial status in all but name by the Treaty of Versailles. It was therefore appropriate for the German Communist Party to seek allies for a war of national liberation from the Anglo-French yoke. Among such allies, none would be more effective than the Freikorps and other military units on the political far right. Such an unholy partnership would have as its objective to overturn Versailles. This would in turn disturb the political equilibrium in the states of the victorious Allies. In the ensuing chaos the German Communist Party would seize its chance to take on the German far right in the continent’s supreme political struggle.

For Lenin, this recommendation was mere common sense. Politicians had to be flexible in pursuit of their strategic objectives. He failed to comprehend the negative response he obtained from the German comrades. He should have done. They had become communists in part because they were copying him. He had turned intransigence into an art form. He had defied all public opinion in his country – conservative and liberal as well as socialist – in his preparations for seizing power in 1917. He had discerned that questions of ideological principle were at stake when his adversaries saw only minor practical matters. He had taught that Marxists should hold fast to Marxist orthodoxy. Now this same Lenin, their revolutionary model, was telling them to link arms not even with fellow socialists but with the proponents of the darkest political reaction.

While all this was happening, a terrible event occurred in Lenin’s personal life. Inessa Armand had returned from her Red Cross mission to France and had fallen ill. Lenin wrote her a note:7

Dear Friend,

Please write a note to say what’s up with you. These are foul times: typhoid, influenza, Spanish ’flu, cholera.

I’ve only just got out of bed and am not going out. Nadya has a temperature of 39° and she’s asked to see you.

What’s your temperature?

Don’t you need something to make yourself better? I really ask you to write frankly.

Get better!

Yours,

Lenin

Despite the chatty style, he preserved an emotional distance by addressing her with the polite Russian vy rather than the familiar ty; and he can hardly have been trying to conduct a secret affair with her because he mentioned that his wife Nadya wanted Inessa to visit her. The ties between Lenin and Inessa were close, but they were not of the same nature as in Paris in 1912. Nadya by contrast seemed to have gained in influence over him. Alexandra Kollontai, whose novel The Love of Worker Bees was an allegory of the Lenin-Nadya-Inessa triangle in Paris in 1911–12, noted in her 1920 diary how ‘he takes great notice of her’.8

As for Lenin, he was bossy towards Inessa but there was an endearing ineffectuality about his efforts. When he wrote again to her, he tried to stop her venturing outside in the cold. He knew that she would ignore his instructions and directed her to tell her children to command her not to go outside in the freezing cold. It was Lenin’s habit to supervise the medical treatment of his associates, but there is no parallel to his detailed intervention in the case of Inessa.

She recovered from this bout of ill health and agreed to act as interpreter at the Second Comintern Congress in July. This was very intensive work and – coming on top of disputes with colleagues such as Alexandra Kollontai – induced a relapse. In truth Inessa was exhausted, and Lenin advised her to go to a sanatorium. He suggested that, if she insisted on going abroad, she should avoid France for fear she might be arrested. In Lenin’s opinion it would be better if she made for Norway or Holland. Better still, he suggested, she might try the Caucasus, and he promised to make dispositions for a pleasant period of care for her there. To cheer her up he mentioned that he had been hunting in the woods near the old Armand estate outside Moscow, and that the peasants had talked nostalgically about the days before 1917 when there had been real ‘order’. Inessa agreed to go to the spa town Kislovodsk in the mountains of the north Caucasus. Lenin gave orders that she and her son Andrei – then a lad of sixteen – should be well looked after. But the area was affected by a cholera epidemic; it also had not yet been pacified by the Red Army. Inadvertently Lenin had sent his former lover into mortal danger. First she caught cholera. Then the order was given for people to be evacuated to Nalchik. Inessa’s health was finally broken, and she perished on 24 September 1920.

Knowing she was dying, she had put down her last thoughts in a presentational notebook given to her at the Comintern Congress. They make for poignant reading. Inessa wrote on 1 September:9

Will this feeling of inner death ever pass away? I’ve reached the point where I find it strange that other people laugh so easily and that they obviously get pleasure from talking. I now laugh and smile almost never because an inner joy induces this in me but because it’s sometimes necessary to smile. I’m also struck by my present indifference to nature. And yet it used to make me tremble so strongly. And how little I’ve now begun to love people. Previously I would approach each person with warm feelings. Now I’m indifferent to everyone. But the main thing is that I’m bored with almost everyone. Hot feelings have remained only for my children and for V.I.

There was only one person she could have referred to as ‘V.I.’, and that was Vladimir Ilich Lenin. Inessa continued:10

It’s as if my heart has died in all other respects. As if, having devoted all my strength and all my passion to V.I. and to the cause of our [political] work, all sources of love and sympathy for people – to whom it once was so rich – have been exhausted. With the exception of V.I. and my children I no longer have any personal relationships with people except purely practical relationships.

Inessa called herself a ‘living corpse’; it was not only cholera but also a broken heart that did for her. Ten days later she contemplated the meaning of her life:11

For romantics, love holds the first place in a person’s life. It’s higher than anything else. And until recently I was far nearer to such a notion than I am now. True, for me love was never the only thing. Alongside love there was public activity. And both in my life and in the past there have been not a few instances where I’ve sacrificed my happiness and my love for the good of the cause. But previously it used to seem that love had a significance equal to that of public activity. Now it’s not like that. The significance of love in comparison with public activity becomes quite small and cannot bear comparison with public activity.

On the point of death, she tried to persuade herself that her work for the Revolution meant more to her than the man she loved.

The matter-of-fact official telegram to Lenin cut him to the quick: ‘It has been impossible to save Comrade Inessa Armand who was ill with cholera. She died on 24 September. We are accompanying the body to Moscow.’12 Lenin had been responsible for her convalescing in the chaotic Caucasus rather than in France, and now she had perished there. It took a fortnight before her body was brought back in a leaden coffin to Moscow. The train arrived in the early hours of 11 October, and the cortège made its way from the railway station after dawn. Lenin and Nadezhda Konstantinovna had been waiting at the station. As the cortège neared the capital’s centre, Lenin was obviously overcome with grief. Nadezhda Konstantinovna understood, and gripped him by the arm to hold him up. No one could forget the pitiful condition of the man. The young Bolshevik Yelizaveta Drabkina watched the horse-drawn hearse and the draped black flag: ‘There was something inexpressibly sad about his drooping shoulders and lowly bent head.’13 Angelica Balabanova had the same impression at the funeral: ‘I never saw such torment; I never saw any human being so completely absorbed by sorrow, by the effort to keep it for himself, to guard it against the attention of others, as if that awareness could have diminished the intensity of his feeling.’14

Lenin did not record his feelings on paper. He had given up many pleasures for ‘the cause’: material comfort, profession, chess, classical music and cycling. He had avoided a permanent association with Inessa: the Revolution for him was always dominant. But he grieved deeply when her corpse was delivered from Nalchik.

By his side were friends and associates who thought that he was never the same again. Some said that he would have lived longer had he not lost Inessa. Shaken he certainly was; yet he had not lost the power of his will. Since 1912 he had accustomed himself to living apart from her. He could also cope with the froideurs of Nadya. Throughout his career he displayed an ability to be undistracted by matters of the heart. Usually it had been his physical health or his polemics that had thrown him off balance. ‘Romance’ did not get in his way, and Inessa’s death did not destroy him. If his external reaction is any guide, he was hurt worse than by any other event since his brother’s execution in 1887. But he quickly recovered. He had an enormous capacity for emotional self-suppression. He loved politics and lived for the political life. He was fixated by the importance of ideas. He was not a robot and did not deny, at least to himself, the benefits of a deep relationship; but personal love – the love of a man for a woman – was secondary to him, and, if politics so demanded, he thought he could survive without it.

Inessa’s funeral was held on 12 October; her corpse was buried alongside other deceased Bolshevik heroes beneath the Kremlin Wall. A fortnight earlier Lenin had faced the Ninth Party Conference. The invasion of Poland had turned into a rout. The economy was a shambles. There were industrial strikes and peasant rebellions, and even in the armed forces there were disturbances. The Bolshevik party was restive, and its internal factions – the Democratic Centralists and the Workers’ Opposition – relished the chance to attack the Politburo behind the closed doors of the Conference. Agreement about what should be party policy was absent. But there was a widespread feeling among Bolsheviks that something had gone terribly wrong in the Soviet state. It was not in Lenin’s nature to walk away from a dispute: he raged to give the critics a taste of their own medicine.

Thus although he straightway confessed that a catastrophe had indeed occurred in Poland, he fudged the question of responsibility. He spoke of the approval given by the Central Committee to the invasion of ‘ethnographically’ Polish territory; and then he admitted that the party leadership had not taken a formal decision on the matter:15

When this resolution was placed before the Central Committee, there was no failure to understand the somewhat awkward character of this resolution in the sense that it appeared impossible to vote against it. How could it be possible to vote against assistance for sovietisation?

The question was rhetorical; it was meant to embarrass an audience of zealots into recognising that they, too, would have voted for the invasion of Poland. But this was a sleight of argument. Lenin had been almost alone in pressing central party colleagues into the invasion; and he now wanted to evade personal responsibility. He deliberately let his analysis wander a bit, too, when he tried to define the mistake that had been made. Was it political or strategic? He addressed the distinction, but avoided giving his conclusion. He also revealed that, on balance, the Central Committee had decided not to set up an enquiry into the military; but again he refrained from explaining why. Throughout the report he touched on sensitive points only glancingly:

We in the Politburo during the Civil War had to decide purely strategic questions – questions that were so purely strategic that we looked at each other with smiles on our faces: how was it that we’d turned into strategists? Among us there were people who had not seen war even from a far distance.

Was this an oblique appeal for sympathy? Certainly no one in the Politburo had less experience of warfare than Lenin. Be that as it may, Lenin was claiming that he had performed pretty well – for a neophyte military planner – against Kolchak, Denikin and Yudenich. But at no point in his report – and this is the crux of the matter – did Lenin implicate himself personally in the disaster outside Warsaw. He acknowledged a mistake only on behalf of the ‘Central Committee’.

Lenin said not a word against the use of ‘revolutionary war’. But steadily he was coming round to the opinion that the Red Army’s bayonets should remain sheathed for the foreseeable future. The logical moment had therefore arrived to reconsider policies in general. The Party Conference, however, gave no opportunity for this. The delegates had come to Moscow not to debate the whole range of options but to give the central party leaders a grilling. The conception and realisation of the Warsaw campaign was the object of harsh criticism. Here Lenin had a lucky break. The rivalry between Trotski and Stalin spilled out into vehement open dispute when Trotski denounced Stalin for misleading the Central Committee about the prospect of military victory. There had been no internal party spat of so personal a nature since the searing disagreements of 1903–4. Politburo member attacked Politburo member. Stalin, bristling at his humiliation, demanded the right of reply. Lenin decided to take sides; perhaps he genuinely agreed with Trotski, but in any case he could see that he was being offered a chance to help pick a scapegoat. The result was an unseemly row. But Lenin emerged unscathed. Indeed by the end of the Conference he was the only Politburo member not to have annoyed a large number of the angry delegates.

The other great dispute was focussed on the party itself. The Democratic Centralists and the Workers’ Opposition condemned the internal practices of party life as bureaucratic and over-centralised. The Workers’ Opposition added that party officialdom had opened a rift between the central leaders and the rank-and-file members and that the working class as a whole had lost faith in the party. Within the Central Committee there were figures who agreed with much of the analysis. Among them was Central Committee Secretary Yevgeni Preobrazhenski. But it was Zinoviev, despite being a very authoritarian leader in Petrograd, who spoke on the Central Committee’s behalf in favour of internal party reform. His sincerity was cast in doubt before the Conference’s exhausted participants agreed to give the central party leaders the benefit of the doubt. Once again Lenin, who was just as responsible as any Politburo member for the objectionable organisational phenomena, escaped without being blamed.

But the question what to do about the country’s condition remained an acute one. To the outside world – and the outside world in this instance included all mortals not belonging to the central leadership of the Bolshevik party and Soviet government – it appeared that Lenin was still keen to adhere to every last detail of the policies developed in the Civil War. This is in many ways true. But the qualification must be added that he was never unidimensional in his planning. He had always wanted to sign treaties with foreign capitalist states as a means of breaking up the international phalanx ranged against Soviet Russia. Kamenev had been in London negotiating a resumption of trade at the very time when the Red Army was moving upon Warsaw. Now that he was balked in Poland, he aimed to develop commercial and diplomatic relations still further. Furthermore, Lenin in spring 1918 had declared that if Russian economic reconstruction could not be undertaken in alliance with a Soviet Germany, it should be attempted with aid from capitalist Germany. He resumed this idea in 1920 and wanted to sign concession agreements with German entrepreneurs, even to the point of granting them land in Russia where they could raise productivity by the introduction of advanced capitalist farming techniques. He also wished to tempt the Nobel oil company back to involvement in oil-extraction in Azerbaijan.

At home, too, he had some modifications he wanted to make. He recognised that violent seizure of grain from peasants by the state authorities was extremely unpopular in the countryside; and although he would not accept Trotski’s proposal for a limited reversion to the legal private sale of foodstuffs by the peasantry, he wanted to coax the rural households to sow more grain. For this purpose he contemplated giving material rewards to peasants whose production could be shown to have increased.

This was not a break in the wall of the party’s wartime economic policy; but many fellow Bolshevik leaders in the provinces were aghast. What, they asked, was a proposal for material reward except a backdoor method of reintroducing capitalism? And what on earth did Lenin think he was up to with his welcome for German farmers and industrialists, British timber concessionaires and – worst of all – the Nobel oil company? Had he taken leave of his senses? Could he not see that his various projects, taken together, amounted to an economic Brest-Litovsk? As the year 1920 drew to a close, there was therefore little reason for Lenin to celebrate. He had won the Russian Civil War only to lose the unnecessary Polish–Soviet War. He had become so distracted by military planning that he had ignored unrest in his party; and industrial strikes and peasant revolts were occurring with ever greater intensity across the country. His reputation for careful management of the central political machinery was going into decline. His health, never very good for decades, was decidedly shaky. He had suffered, too, the loss of the woman he had loved, Inessa Armand. And he could not even tell himself at New Year 1921 that the October Revolution had been made secure. On the contrary, honesty permitted him only to say that things were going to get worse before they could conceivably get better.

25. THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY January to June 1921

The winter months of 1920–21 jolted Lenin into thinking hard again about state policies. He felt no remorse about his wartime strategy. His policies had ruined the economy, induced popular revolts, isolated the country from diplomatic and financial assistance and engendered military disaster in Poland. But, while he had reluctantly acknowledged that a mistake had been made over Poland, he was singularly unrepentant about the rest. Indeed he had few regrets. But steadily he had been driven to the conclusion that mortal danger would engulf the regime without strategic change. Lenin’s new idea was very simple. He proposed to replace forcible grain requisitioning with a tax-in-kind on grain. Once the peasants had delivered the fiscal contribution assigned to them, he said, they should be allowed to trade their produce in local markets. Private commerce in grain should again be allowed. Lenin successfully put this idea to the Politburo on 8 February 1921.

No great acumen was required of Lenin to invent his New Economic Policy (or NEP). In agricultural essentials it had been advocated since 1918 by the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries and in February 1920 by Trotski, who in 1921 reminded Lenin that the change could have happened a year earlier but for his stubbornness. The NEP was the obvious way to restore the exchange of products between village and town. This was also the prerequisite for ending famine, disease, industrial ruin and popular rebellion. But, if Lenin’s proposal lacked cerebral distinction, it nevertheless demanded political tenacity – and all the biographers of Lenin, despite extolling his feat in winning the Brest-Litovsk dispute in 1918, have understated the equal achievement involved in introducing the NEP.1 The reason is probably that the dispute about the NEP was not as raucous as the controversy over Brest-Litovsk or even as the ‘trade union discussion’. But this should not disguise the obstacles in Lenin’s path. He had to persuade the Politburo, the Central Committee and the Party Congress, and then he had to push the legislation through the Soviet legislative agencies, and even then he had to return and defend the NEP at the Party Conference in May 1921. Without Lenin quite possibly there would have been no NEP. Without the NEP, the Soviet state would have been overwhelmed by popular rebellions.

The policy was exceptionally annoying to his party, which considered a state economic near-monopoly to be a wonderful achievement. This aspect of the party’s ideology had been stiffened through the Civil War, and the Bolsheviks concurred about much more than they disagreed about. Several fundamental policies had become articles of faith. Lenin, who had been toying with ideas for reform in late 1920, was offering a programme of action that seemed to empty Bolshevism of its revolutionary content. Although he remained devoted to the one-party, one-ideology state, he appeared disgracefully keen to abandon state ownership and regulation in the economy.

At the time the party was being buffeted by its so-called ‘trade union discussion’. The dispute had started with Trotski insisting that post-war economic reconstruction needed to operate on the basis of the ‘militarisation of labour’. Trotski wanted to ban strikes and to reduce trade unions to the condition of state organisations. He could not care less about keeping the Bolshevik party as the main instrument of enforcement; he had ignored the party when setting up political commissariats in the Red Army in the Civil War and in 1920 had campaigned for the transference of this system to civilian needs. Trotski also demanded that transport by rail and water should be organised through just such a system.

The dispute was a nightmare for Lenin, who thought Trotski was threatening the unity that had been restored at the Ninth Party Conference. Lenin, while not intending to indulge the trade unions, saw no sense in offending them. But the dispute had got out of hand. Trotski argued that under the dictatorship of the proletariat there was no need for the workers to have a class organisation for protection against their own ‘workers’ state’. Lenin retorted that ‘bureaucratic distortions’ had taken place after the October Revolution and that trade unions still had a useful purpose. A buffer group led by Bukharin formed itself between Lenin and Trotski. The Workers’ Opposition condemned Lenin, Trotski and Bukharin equally. The Democratic Centralists had no agreed position; their members sided with whichever group they fancied. Leaders of each group toured the country trying to drum up support among Bolsheviks in the provinces. Lenin was one of the few leading figures who stayed in Moscow; but even he was preoccupied by the ‘trade union discussion’. As well as producing a lengthy booklet in order to win the debate, he also had to manipulate the levers of factional power to secure victory. Zinoviev travelled around the largest party organisations and Stalin kept watch over the provincial debates from the vantage point of Moscow. To Lenin’s relief, the victory of his group was put beyond serious challenge by February 1921.

Much more important, he argued, was the question what to do to save the October Revolution. The ‘trade union discussion’ was an integral element of this question, but it was not the whole question. Lenin wanted a more direct and fundamental debate. The most effective way to start this was to tackle the policy on food supplies. Only when the party had decided what to do about the acquisition of grain could it begin to sort out its strategic orientation over the next few years.

Yet Lenin could ride two horses at once. He kept on thinking about agrarian policy even while Trotski was ripping the party apart over the trade unions. Lenin did not reveal what had caused his change of mind. But he had talked frequently to peasant representatives at the Eighth Congress of Soviets in December 1920, and he gave audiences to small delegations of peasants in subsequent weeks. He had taken little trips to Yaropolets and Modenovo in the Moscow countryside and spoken to the local villagers. He was left in no doubt that the regime’s popularity stood at its lowest ebb. The evidence coming into the offices of Sovnarkom pointed in the same direction. Lenin was often compelled to absolve provinces from the need to comply with grain-delivery quotas fixed by himself and his government in Moscow. Current policy was unable to feed the country and the situation was getting worse. Soon there were Bolsheviks who were pressing the same case. One of them, V. N. Sokolov, arrived from Siberia where he had witnessed the rural disturbances. Unless the Politburo acted, he privately urged Lenin on 2 February, the problem might turn into a catastrophe.

At the Politburo on the same day a report was given by Bukharin, who had returned from Tambov province. The Politburo at last began to face the fact of ‘peasant uprisings’ across the Russian heartland.2 Tambov was in the Volga region. The leadership of the revolt was a Socialist-Revolutionary, A. S. Antonov. But it was clear that the peasants, many of whom were starving because of the wartime official economic measures and a sudden drought, were infuriated with the Soviet government. Lenin had always taken a dim view of the peasantry of the Volga and in the Civil War he had practised preventive mass repression. In 1921, however, it was too late to apply prevention. The Red Army was needed to crush a rebellion that threatened to bring down the regime. Lenin transferred Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko as political commissar and Mikhail Tukhachevski as commander to carry out the necessary campaign. But this was not enough in itself. There had also to be some steps toward agrarian reform. The October Revolution itself was under threat. It was the Tambov revolt that convinced Lenin that the wartime requisitioning system had to be abolished. But he did not let on to anyone as yet and went on seeing eyewitnesses of the rural scene. One such was the peasant Osip Chernov, who was surprised that the leader of world communism agreed to see him. When Lenin asked him to read out his pencil-written account of his experiences, Chernov told him some uncomfortable truths about the Siberian peasantry. In particular, he pointed out that the richer peasants in that great region had fought against Kolchak as hard as their poorer neighbours and that they were being unfairly treated as anti-Soviet. Chernov stressed that there was no kulak threat there:3

When I’d finished reading, he put the question to me: ‘What’s your background?’ I told him how I belonged to a group of exiled forced-labour prisoners, that I’d been sentenced to forced labour for having belonged to the Socialist-Revolutionary Party but that I now regarded myself as a non-party person and had my own farm in Siberia.

Chernov was precisely the kind of peasant whom the Bolsheviks were routinely designating as a ‘kulak’, depriving him of his entire grain stock and even killing him. Lenin needed to meet people who could talk knowledgeably and frankly. Father Gapon had opened his eyes for him in 1905, and peasants like Osip Chernov were performing the same function in early 1921.

By the time the Politburo next met, on 8 February 1921, Lenin had become a committed advocate: grain requisitioning had to be abolished. Not everyone could be present. The ‘trade union discussion’ was continuing and Trotski and Zinoviev were chasing each other around the Urals trying to maximise support at the forthcoming Party Congress. But four members – Lenin, Kamenev, Stalin and Krestinski – were able to attend. They regarded themselves as being quorate; and having listened to a report by Agriculture Deputy People’s Commissar Nikolai Osinski, Lenin took a single sheet of paper and sketched the agreed change of policy. His ‘Preliminary Rough Draft of Theses on the Peasants’ was the basis for the future NEP. The die had been cast. A working party was set up under Kamenev to fill in the policy details. Not a squeak about the Politburo decision was uttered in public. But on 16 February the Politburo, with some trepidation about the party’s sensitivities, sanctioned the publication of a pro-reform article in Pravda; the joint authors would be low-level Bolshevik activists, not Politburo members.4 Unfortunately A. D. Tsyurupa was upsetting Lenin’s progress by raising objections in the secret working party. The Politburo drew breath and handed the matter to the Central Committee. The tension was tremendous because Central Committee members were already at each other’s throats over the ‘trade union discussion’.

Yet Lenin need not have worried about the Central Committee’s response; meeting on 24 February, its members accepted the working party’s report with just a few modifications.5 By then the depth of the political emergency in the country as a whole was evident. Strikes had broken out in Petrograd, Moscow and the other large industrial cities. There was an incipient mutiny in the Kronstadt naval garrison, and Zinoviev was unsure that he would be able to handle it from his base in nearby Petrograd. Aggravating all this were the peasant uprisings in the Volga region, in Ukraine, in southern Russia and in western Siberia. The disturbances continued even in Moscow. On 2 March, indeed, Kronstadt flared into open mutiny and the Petrograd strikes intensified. Yet still Lenin could not feel confident that his project was accepted in the party. There were plenty of Bolsheviks wishing to continue with the wartime economic programme even if it was provoking armed popular resistance. But Lenin and Trotski were together on this. The revolts were themselves the most powerful argument for reform. When the Central Committee met on 7 March, there was no serious attempt to reverse the Politburo’s agrarian proposals.

The Tenth Party Congress had yet to confirm this. The proceedings started on 8 March and Lenin had prepared well by agreeing a preferred list of members of the new Central Committee at a series of meetings with Stalin and his other closest associates. While he wanted a majority for his faction, Lenin also wanted a sprinkling of Trotskyists, Democratic Centralists and Workers’ Oppositionists to be included. He wanted to control but not to humiliate and exclude the critics. In his Congress opening speech, he acknowledged that a mistake had been made over Poland; he also claimed, surprisingly for a leader who was meant to be the workers’ friend, that too much indulgence had been shown to the working-class consumers at the expense of disgruntled peasants. The party, Lenin said, had to accept military retrenchment, economic reform and intensified political control. He accused the Workers’ Opposition, which appealed for the working class to be enabled to control the factories, of deviating from Marxism. The fact that Marx – and indeed Lenin himself in 1917 – had emphasised the need for workers to control the factories in the era of socialist Revolution was robustly ignored by Lenin. Rather than argue out the case, he announced bleakly that the regime might fall if a consensus on reform and repression did not prevail in the party. As proof he adduced the information about the mutinous talk in the Kronstadt naval garrison. The threat was greater, he declared, than when Kolchak and Denikin had been on the loose.

Towards the end of his speech of two hours he seemed to sense that the Congress, which was being told about the NEP for the first time, might think that he was going soft – or, worse, going pro-peasant and pro-capitalist. He uttered a phrase that chilled the heart:

The peasant must do a bit of starving so as to relieve the factories and towns from complete starvation. On the level of the state in general this is an entirely understandable thing, but we’re not counting on the exhausted, destitute peasant–owner understanding it. And we know you can’t manage without compulsion, to which the devastated peasantry is reacting very strongly.

Plainly the NEP was not going to work by persuasion alone.

As yet there was no answer to the more fundamental question whether the Congress would sanction the NEP. The task was not easy for Lenin. The party had been torn into factions by the ‘trade union discussion’. There was fury even inside Lenin’s faction about the policy on foreign business concessions. There was widespread discontent about the internal organisation of the party since, while some delegates wanted looser discipline, others thought Lenin too gentle. There was confusion about the current diplomatic measures of the party leadership, and not a few delegates wondered how the victories in the October Revolution and the Civil War could be protected and enhanced. Lenin was at his wiliest in coping with the expected tumult. The fact that the Trotskyists, Workers’ Oppositionists and Democratic Centralists were at each other’s throats was helpful. There was no broad agreement on any policy and Lenin had the advantage of at least seeming to know where he wanted the party to go. Others such as Trotski and Shlyapnikov had their own strategy too; but they lacked Lenin’s reputation in the party for getting things right. The April Theses, the October 1917 seizure of power and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had acquired canonical status inside the doctrines of Bolshevism. Lenin was regarded as having the party’s wisest head. There was also an affection for him across the factions; he simply did not incur the personal rancour that was provoked by the other two most prominent Politburo members, Trotski and Zinoviev; and the entire party was aware that if it did not reseal its rifts, it would be overwhelmed by the tide of popular resentment.

Only second-rank leaders openly attacked the NEP in principle. Although it was a close-run thing at times, Lenin held out for victory, and victory was his. The NEP, foreign business concessions, Lenin’s trade union policy, the condemnation of the Workers’ Opposition as a deviation from Marxism: all were resoundingly sanctioned by the Congress.

His triumph would not have been achieved with such aplomb if it had not been for events outside the capital. Midway through the Congress came the news from Kronstadt. The naval garrison had risen in revolt. The mutineers demanded an end to terror, to dictatorship, to grain requisitioning and to one-party rule; they despaired of the Bolshevik party and had grown to hate it; they demanded ‘all power to soviets and not to parties’. This was the deepest internal military crisis since the July 1918 uprising of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. The Kronstadters, moreover, were renowned as great supporters of the Bolsheviks in 1917. It was an awful time for a mutiny to occur. The Soviet regime was threatened by peasant revolts in Russia, Ukraine, the north Caucasus and western Siberia. A terrible famine had started in the Volga and Ukraine. Industry everywhere was in ruins. Rival political parties had been suppressed, but none of them had given up hope of making a return to public life. Religious and national bodies across the former Russian Empire wanted an end to the communist regime. The great foreign powers – Britain, France, Japan and the United States – wished Soviet Russia nothing but ill. Now even Kronstadt had turned against the Bolsheviks.

In this situation it was easier than beforehand to urge the Congress that unity was the supreme requirement. Even the Workers’ Oppositionists, whom Lenin was denouncing, volunteered for the military operation to cross the ice from Petrograd to Kronstadt Island. Red Army troops were camouflaged by new white uniforms and rushed north. Trotski went with them, and the fortress of Kronstadt was seized back for the Bolsheviks. Lenin stayed behind and had to wait for news. The most he could do was to produce propaganda, and his Pravda articles were among his most disgraceful travesties of truth. According to Lenin, the Kronstadt mutineers had been duped by the Socialist-Revolutionaries who in turn were the agents of foreign capitalist powers. Lenin, consulting with fellow Central Committee members about the punishment to be meted out to the Kronstadters, demanded ferocious reprisals. The Kronstadt fortress fell to superior numbers. The relief of those Congress delegates remaining in Petrograd was almost palpable. The result was that Lenin’s agrarian reform was not criticised as savagely as it might otherwise have been. He saw his chance and pushed through a resolution banning factional activity from the party altogether. If economic retreat was to succeed, he argued, the Bolsheviks had to strengthen their internal unity. He had won by the skin of his teeth, but he had won.

Yet he had no respite. In the last week of March 1921 the German Communist Party, egged on by the Hungarian communist leader Béla Kun on behalf of Comintern, attempted to seize power in Berlin. Almost certainly this had the support of both Grigori Zinoviev and Nikolai Bukharin, but the planning and execution of the insurrectionary measures were botched. When he heard of the ‘March Action’ Lenin was furious.

Even on his birthday on 23 April 1921 (according to the new calendar) he had to, or felt he had to, adhere to a punishing schedule of duties. Thus he chaired a crucial Politburo meeting, among whose items for decision were education, Siberia, Ukrainian military dispositions, the Kronstadt mutiny’s aftermath and the Workers’ Opposition.6 Despite this long meeting, Lenin’s day was not over. He appointed a new personal aide for himself in Sovnarkom. He wrote to the People’s Commissariats for External Affairs and for Internal Affairs. He intervened in the plans drawn up for G. L. Shklovski’s medical treatment; this was almost a hobby of Lenin’s in relation to leading comrades: their health was regarded by him as a matter of state business. Meanwhile he followed up the previous agenda of various governmental bodies such as the Council of Labour and Defence and the Lesser Sovnarkom. In the little time he had left to himself he tried to write up some pages of his booklet on the NEP, On the Food Tax. It was not his busiest working day; but it was packed with duties that, he felt, could not be performed without him. He had reached the age of fifty-one and did not have a minute to himself.

Political life was the core of his existence; he was not one to feel sorry for himself when duty called. Whenever he liked, he could request Stepan Gil to drive him out to the Gorki sanatorium, but generally he just got on with politics. Nevertheless he was dreadfully weary. He had coped effectively with revolution, war and even with peace and its problems. He had survived the loss of relatives and of Inessa. But he was enormously disappointed that he had not been able to depend on his fellow party leaders. In the winter of 1920–1 they had been more interested in internal polemics than in saving the Revolution, and the polemics did not cease in spring 1921: Lenin still had a job on his hands in holding the party to the decisions taken at the Tenth Party Congress. And when the leading Bolsheviks were not fighting among themselves, they were grasping after a respite from work; the intense wartime pressures were taking their toll and each leader experienced severe problems with his health. The Politburo became inoperative as one by one the members reported sick, and Lenin, despite his own chronic ailments, had to soldier on alone. He was working at the edge of his coping capacity.

But there was nothing else for it. Trotski was in an obvious state of exhaustion and had to have a holiday. Zinoviev suffered not one but two heart attacks and Kamenev too had a cardiac problem.7 Stalin had had to have his appendix removed. Bukharin had only recently returned from convalescence. Lenin had had lonely struggles in the past, but this one took as much mental toughness as any.

And it was in these same months that the question of the trade unions rejoined the political agenda. Alexander Shlyapnikov, the Workers’ Oppositionist leader, continued to stir up trouble in defiance of the Tenth Party Congress ban on factional activity. The central party leaders – those who were not in sanatoria or under the surgeon’s knife – assigned Mikhail Tomski as Chairman of the All-Russia Central Council of the Trade Unions to enforce the party’s will in the Metalworkers’ Union. Tomski, facing an angry audience, did his best but made several concessions to the trade union activists. Lenin plunged into a delirium at what he took to be Tomski’s act of betrayal, and demanded his immediate exclusion from the Party Central Committee. In the past Lenin had often got overheated, only to calm down a day later. Nor was it unknown for him to give an exaggerated display of passion in order to secure a political result. But weeks after the Metalworkers’ Union episode he was still raging to have Tomski flung out of the Central Committee and even out of the party.8

Lenin’s nerves were in shreds; his fatigue was extreme. For Tomski was not one of his critics but quite the opposite: he had been a steadfast ally throughout the ‘trade union discussion’ in the previous winter. Lenin thought his luck at the recent Party Congress would hold and that leading party colleagues would recognise that the supreme priority was to realise and develop the NEP. He felt especially isolated. It was clear that the NEP, which was passed into law in April and was starting at last to be imposed across the country, was not securely accepted in the party. For many – quite possibly most – regional and central Bolshevik leaders, the reintroduction of private trade in grain was repugnant. But then Lenin and Kamenev proceeded to add various measures in order to make the reform truly workable. They went beyond the original reform project, permitting peasants to trade outside their own locality and allowing commercial middlemen to operate; they gave extensive rights to rural agricultural co-operatives; and they gave little encouragement to state collective farms. They even sanctioned the return of small-scale private manufacturers to the industrial sector. The capitalist corner of the economy was filling an ever greater space. When and where, asked the Bolsheviks, was the process going to end?

In an effort to prove his revolutionary credentials Lenin finished his booklet On the Food Tax. His main contention was that Sovnarkom and the Central Committee back in 1918 had recognised the need for some space to be given to capitalism in the Russian economy. Thus the NEP was not new at all, but a policy restored. The onset of Civil War had intervened and necessitated emergency measures that he now referred to as ‘War Communism’. Such measures, he declared, could be suspended. Obviously there was some truth in this. But it was far from being the whole truth, and Lenin knew it, for the NEP allowed greater legal freedom for the peasantry to trade grain than had previously been available to them.

But no one was going to argue about the history of the Bolsheviks. As Lenin clearly perceived, his party was looking to him to show them why on earth they should still believe that the NEP was Marxist in orientation. On the Food Tax supplied arguments in abundance. He stressed above all that the NEP would not involve political concessions or ideological compromise. The supreme goal remained as previously: the consolidation of socialism and the further advance towards communism. He wanted, even under the NEP, to move towards elaborating a ‘uniform economic plan for the entire state’. He retained a penchant for terror and recommended the shooting of individuals for common fraud and corruption, for bureaucratic abuses and even for commercial profiteering: ‘It is impossible to distinguish speculation from “correct” trade if speculation is to be understood in the politico-economic sense. Freedom of trade is capitalism, capitalism is speculation: it would be ridiculous to close our eyes to this.’ So capitalism was not going to be done any favours. Rather it was going to be exploited by the Soviet state: capitalist tendencies in the economy would lead to the formation of larger units of production, which in turn would facilitate the incorporation of these units as state property in the near future. And capitalism would enable Russia to rise more quickly to the technical and cultural level necessary for socialism to be attained. The NEP was consequently, in Lenin’s presentation, a resumption of the road taken by the party since the October Revolution but interrupted by the Civil War, the road to socialism.

He put this case forcefully and directly at the Party Conference, held to discuss the NEP from 26 May 1921. He knew that he would have to deal with the delayed reaction of leading Bolsheviks to the NEP. As yet he could not predict the strength of feeling, but even he – the party’s fiercest polemicist – was shaken by the vituperation unleashed at him. There was widespread agreement that large-scale industry was being neglected, that workers were losing out, that the central leadership had not properly explained its measures and that the kulak danger was being overlooked. Lenin’s booklet did not escape criticism. It was said to be unclear and incoherent. Not a single speaker raised his voice in defence of Lenin. Not once in his long career had he been the butt of such a verbal mauling.

A furious Lenin came back next day for a debate on the recent débâcle in the trade union leadership. Lenin was not there at the start, but asked for the floor to express his lingering anger. After recounting the sins of Tomski, he suggested that the affair pointed to the supreme need for internal party unity. Not for the last time he argued that the basic danger to the Revolution was the clash between the respective interests of the workers and the peasants. Factions might arise in defence of one or the other social class.9 The sole antidote was discipline. His plea was directed not only at avoiding a further trade-union débâcle but also at preventing a reconsideration of the NEP. Lenin’s passion swayed the Conference. It had been noteworthy that, although universal objection had been voiced about aspects of the NEP and its application, not a soul had called for its replacement. Acquiescence was on the rise. Tacitly it was agreed that fundamentally there was no alternative. The Conference had things it could be enthusiastic about. In particular, it agreed that ‘a merciless struggle’ should be started against the Socialist-Revolutionaries. No one was happy that the party was giving up its overt military commitment to spreading socialist revolution in the West. But Lenin cheered them up: ‘Of course, if a revolution occurs in Europe, we’ll naturally change policy.’10 This remark was never published. All that Pravda was allowed to report was Lenin’s prognosis that the NEP had to be kept in place for many years.

The toughness of his Conference performance jumps off the pages of the stenographic record. It was also a bravura display. He had invited pity by reciting the list of central party leaders who had let him down or had been ill. He had challenged his critics on their own ground. Strutting up and down the platform of the Sverdlov Hall, he had shown anger and determination. He had scattered his apothegms on Marxism through his speeches. When his orthodoxy had been questioned, he had laid into his adversaries. At no point did he relax his belligerent insistence that the NEP – the expanded version of the NEP he had developed since February – was the sole means of surviving the general crisis of the regime.

The viciousness of the debates was such that Lenin decided to keep the proceedings as secret as possible. The party had confirmed the strategic options it had taken since February 1921, and he did not want others to know how tumultuous an opposition had been proffered initially. He also needed to reinforce his victory over his party with a campaign against the leftist elements in the Comintern. The fiasco of the March 1921 Action in Berlin continued to rankle. Any repetition of such ‘adventurism’, as Lenin described it, might jeopardise the various commercial and diplomatic agreements that Sovnarkom had authorised since the beginning of the year. To Lenin it appeared self-evident after the débâcle in Poland that revolutionary expansionism had to be handled with subtlety in the foreseeable future. There was too much to lose. On 16 March 1921 an Anglo-Soviet trade agreement was signed, and one of its conditions was that the Soviet authorities would desist from subversive activities in the territory of the British Empire. Two days later a peace treaty was signed with Poland in the neutral city of Riga, capital of Latvia. A diplomatic deal was done, too, with Turkey. And for Lenin it was wonderful that approaches were being made to him by business circles in the USA and especially Germany. The protection and enhancement of Soviet interests appeared to him to be on the reachable horizon.

There were phrases he occasionally used, mostly with foreigners, which gave the impression that he was satisfied with this condition. He was a good conjuror. When he said that he favoured ‘peaceful coexistence’, many in the West began to believe that he was some kind of pacifist. But among his fellow communists, whether Russians or foreigners, he absolutely never expressed such a non-Marxist consideration. Why should he indeed? He still believed that Soviet Russia would eventually need to be accompanied by Soviet Germany, Soviet France and Soviet Britain. But he had always prided himself on being able to make the best of a bad job. He continued to sanction the secret dispatch of money, spies and propaganda to the rest of the world, particularly to central Europe. He did what he could to divide the capitalist powers among themselves. He did not explain how the balance would be kept between a rapprochement with such powers and an enhancement of the interests of global socialist Revolution. He had not worked this out even for himself.

One thing was clear to him: the Comintern had to be put straight about the need to avoid any kind of insurrectionary impatience that might endanger Soviet Russia by encouraging France and the United Kingdom to organise an anti-communist crusade. His last great effort of the year after the Polish débâcle was devoted to binding foreign communists to this policy at the Third Comintern Congress that opened in Moscow on 23 June 1921. He kept a wary eye on influential figures in the Comintern such as Karl Radek and Béla Kun. The Communist Party of Germany objected to being criticised for the March Action; its leaders continued to feel that they had only acted as Lenin’s Bolsheviks had done in 1917. Lenin quite lost his temper with them. Obviously he reckoned that they might make another ill-judged attempt to seize power. At the Congress he declared that the Bolsheviks had risen against the Provisional Government only after they had secured a ‘majority of soviets of workers’ and peasants’ deputies’ and that this was the true precedent for the German communists to follow. This was false history. It was not in fact until after the October 1917 Revolution that the Bolsheviks acquired an absolute majority even in the urban soviets. But by the end of the Civil War the myth was believed by most Bolsheviks – and perhaps Lenin himself believed it. And by the end of the Congress, on 12 July, he had got his way.

Lenin had had to be at his persuasive best. The problem was that he often lost his tactfulness. The Hungarian communists, especially Béla Kun, had taken offence at his commentary. For this, unusually, Lenin apologised; but he reasserted the correctness of his current policy and tried to suggest that he, too, had been wrong in the past:11

I therefore hasten to communicate in writing: when I myself was an émigré (for more than 15 years), I several times took up ‘too left-wing’ a position (as I now can see). In August 1917 I too was an émigré and made too ‘leftist’ a proposal to the Central Committee, which fortunately was completely rejected.

This confession had been a long time in coming. Unlike his other reference to the history of 1917, moreover, it was demonstrably true. It might be added that his proposal to the Central Committee not only in August but also in October had been disastrous. The difference was that his August 1917 proposal would have put his party’s existence in jeopardy but his insistence on carrying through his October proposal doomed his country to rack and ruin.

He was never going to reconsider the whole project of the Bolshevik seizure of power. His life and career were tied inextricably to the October 1917 Revolution, and he wanted the Comintern to accept that he knew better than any living communist, Russian or foreign, how best to protect that Revolution. He had done this with ferocity at confidential meetings of the Politburo and the Central Committee. The Red Army had been dispatched to suppress the Kronstadt mutineers and to kill the leaders and transfer the rest to Ukhta forced-labour camp in the Russian far north. He had approved the transfer of political commissar Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko and commander Mikhail Tukhachevski to Tambov with the task of rooting out the Tambov peasant rebels, if need be by use of poison gas delivered by aeroplane bombing raids. He had sanctioned violence against all those who had politically resisted the Reds as they moved into Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia. As in 1891–2, he had looked away when reports were made to him of the growing famine across Russia and Ukraine even though cases of cannibalism were widespread. He let the Cheka loose whenever industrial strikes took place. Not once did he give a signal that he was depressed. Not once did he say to a single associate that the October Revolution had been made in vain or that all the bloodshed was getting too much for him.

Instead he reflected on a year’s satisfactory work. But for him, his party would have thrown itself off a precipice. The NEP, by combining deep military and political repression with very marginal economic reform, was the barest minimum that could save the Soviet regime. He had seen this later than he could and should have done. But no other Bolshevik could have pushed the party into it. Days before the end of the Third Comintern Congress he was exhausted, and to the disappointment of the Congress he did not appear for the closing session. But he had done what he had set out to do. He could not afford to brag about this. But the triumphs at the Party Congress, Party Conference and Comintern Congress were the products of exceptional political skill. Without Lenin, there would have been no Revolution in October 1917. Without Lenin, the Russian Communist Party would not have lasted much beyond the end of 1921.

26. A QUESTION OF SURVIVAL July 1921 to July 1922

Most of the basic components of Lenin’s New Economic Policy were in place. Peasants were allowed to sell their grain surplus to whomever they liked, and small-scale private manufacturing and commerce returned to the towns; and overt threats to subvert capitalism in Europe were put into abeyance. At the same time there was no slackening of the grip of the one-party, one-ideology state. The leading posts in public institutions were staffed by Bolsheviks, and the Cheka – redesignated as the Main Political Administration – arrested dissenters. With the exception of tsarist Poland and the Baltic states, the outlying regions of the former Russian Empire had been reconquered. Marxist tenets were given official precedence over every rival national, religious and cultural vision. The expectation in the party of Lenin was that sooner or later the world would be won for communism.

By mid-1921, however, Lenin felt inadequate to his personal responsibilities. The problem was not intellectual or political but simply physical; his health, which had never been wonderful, was in drastic decline. He could no longer put in a full day’s work. The chronic headaches and insomnia had got worse, and he had suffered a series of ‘small’ heart attacks. Having interrogated his doctors, he saw that they were in a quandary about their diagnosis and he turned for advice instead to his brother Dmitri. This had a positive result for one of his problems. Several specialists were suggesting that Lenin was suffering from stomach illness. Dmitri Ilich thought otherwise after watching him play skittles at Gorki, and told him that he was jerking his back at the game and thereby straining the sinews of his stomach. As soon as Lenin gave up skittles, the problem with his stomach disappeared.1 But, beyond that, Dmitri Ilich was as perplexed as everyone else and the other medical symptoms continued to give trouble. Lenin was so desperate that he stopped keeping his secret from the Politburo. He did this with reluctance since he was wary of interference by his fellow leaders. But he was caught in a trap of his own making. Having set the precedent of ordering sick colleagues to go to hospitals or sanatoria, he could not reasonably complain if the Politburo decided upon his own medical regimen.

On 4 June 1921 the Politburo instructed him to take a month’s holiday,2 and obediently Lenin moved out to Gorki. He had permission to return to Moscow only for a few sessions of the Third Comintern Congress. But the stark reality, which he withheld from all but the inner cabal of the central party leadership, was that he was seriously ill. On 8 July he himself asked for an easing of his workload over the following month.3 The request was granted. On 9 August, his colleagues took the initiative and ordered him to extend his leave. Lenin was frank: ‘I can’t work.’4 Medical examinations followed and the various specialists prescribed a lengthy abstention from work. But Lenin, who until then had been uncharacteristically docile, argued with his doctors and secured their consent to reduce but not eliminate his public activity. He interpreted this irresponsibly. He continued to chair the Politburo, Central Committee and Sovnarkom; he also appeared at the Congress of Soviets in December.

Meanwhile he moved from one former estate mansion to another in the Moscow countryside before settling at Gorki in the ‘Big House’, where rooms were being prepared for him. The Gorki mansion had been built in the eighteenth century at the height of the provincial gentry’s passion for building splendid houses for themselves on their estates. It had been renovated in 1910 by the new owners, General and Mrs Reinbot; it therefore, unlike most such estate houses, already had central heating and electricity. A winter garden had also been added before the Great War. But the architectural beauty had been preserved. The classical façade was graced by six white columns. Inside the rooms had generous high ceilings and comfortable, well-maintained furniture. With its two storeys and spacious rooms it afforded an environment of ease. Outside there were wooded parklands where rabbits were plentiful among the birches. There was also a neat little pond where the old owners had fished. Mushrooms grew abundantly in season. Immediately to the south of the mansion there flowed the river Pakhra. The air around Gorki, which is set on high ground, was clean and tranquil. Lenin had chosen a splendid place for his convalescence.

He was joined at weekends by Nadezhda Konstantinovna and Maria Ilinichna. Determined to establish a working environment for himself, he took their Kremlin housemaid Sasha with him.5 He gave instructions for an additional telephone line to be connected to nearby Podolsk so that he could be sure of instant communication with the Kremlin. The bookcases in the drawing room were stocked with four hundred books for his ready reference – life would not be worth living without books.6 Then Stepan Gil brought out a Rolls-Royce saloon car and stationed it in the garage to the side of the house. This splendid vehicle, gleaming and light-grey, had been had been bought in London on Sovnarkom’s behalf by Foreign Trade People’s Commissar Leonid Krasin. Unfortunately the Rolls-Royce was unusable in the winter months and Lenin permitted it to be adapted for snowy conditions. This involved an act of industrial vandalism. The wheels of the vehicle were removed, and huge skis were fixed to the front of the chassis and caterpillar tracks to the back. This would enable his chauffeur to negotiate the winding path to the sanatorium without getting stuck in snowdrifts. Mr Rolls and Mr Royce would hardly have approved.

Lenin was more fastidious as a resident of the Big House itself. He stopped the servants from removing the dust covers from the furniture since he intended, at the end of his convalescence, to leave things exactly as he had found them. Such restraint was in contrast with his attempt in 1918 to light a fire in the first-floor grate as he had done in London exile in Mrs Yeo’s house in Holford Square.7 The chimneys at Gorki had not been designed for this purpose, and the result was a blaze that would have burned down the mansion if his bodyguards had not moved swiftly to put it out.

On normal days, in any case, Lenin did not like the temperature too warm. He expected his doctors too to be hardy types; the psychiatrist Professor Viktor Osipov was disconcerted to find that Lenin had ordered that the temperature should rise no higher than 15° centigrade.8 But Osipov knew better than to complain: he had only just been released from the custody of the Cheka.9 One day he was about to be tried, and perhaps shot, as a counter-revolutionary agent, the next he was among the chief doctors attending to the Revolution’s leader. Faced with the problem of Lenin’s illness, the Politburo had had to take a more pragmatic approach to suspected ‘enemies of the people’. Only doctors could cure patients; and anyway the evidence against Osipov was flimsy in the extreme. People’s Commissar of Health Nikolai Semashko took advice as to who were the best specialists available. Money was no obstacle to attracting foreigners to join the quest to cure the ailing Lenin. Thus it came about that a group of German professors were invited to join Osipov and other distinguished Russian doctors to diagnose what was wrong and restore him to full physical fitness.

The patient’s workload since 1917 was making itself felt, and he had been foolish in not lowering it drastically in the second half of 1921. Apart from brief periods of convalescence, he had not been able to take the lengthy summer holidays he had enjoyed as an emigrant. His body and mind cried out for a rest. He was becoming frantic, and did not know whom to turn to. His experience with Russian doctors, except for his brother Dmitri, had bred mistrust, and the German doctors fetched at considerable expense by the People’s Commissariat of Health had yet to agree on a diagnosis. (In fact they never did.) And all the time Lenin’s condition was worsening. But one thing hurt him more than any physical pain he was suffering; this was that for the first time in his life he was losing the will to work. He got up some mornings and did not care if he looked at his papers or not.10 This was beyond his understanding. He could scarcely believe it was happening to him. Purposefulness had been one of his cardinal characteristics since childhood. It was an unforgivable sin in the Ulyanov family to fail to get on with one’s appointed tasks. To fail to want to get on with them was not just unforgivable: it was unimaginable.

Lenin’s father Ilya Nikolaevich had driven himself to physical exhaustion while setting up a network of primary schools in Simbirsk province. His brother Alexander omitted to come home for the Christmas vacations from St Petersburg University so as to be able to revise for his biology exams. Nikolai Chernyshevski devoted himself to research on Russian sociology and economics while serving out years of administrative exile in Siberia. Karl Marx wrote volumes of general social theory in London. These heroes of Lenin had worked till they dropped dead. Lenin had been like them. But suddenly, in his fifty-second year, he no longer felt an automatic compulsion to go on working.

No one could explain what was going wrong. He was willing to talk about his listlessness to his doctor brother and to the specialists who tended to him. Listlessness was one of two new problems. But it was not until he had a consultation with Professor Liveri Darkevich on 4 March 1922 that he confided in him about the second. Darkevich, a gifted listener as well as a neuropathologist, elicited from him the statement that for some time he had been suffering from periodic ‘obsessions’. We still do not know the exact content of the obsessions, but clearly Lenin wondered whether he was going mad. They had difficulty in discussing the symptoms in Russian, but in French they could communicate since Lenin was more accustomed to European-language medical textbooks and terminology. He was in the pit of despair. The synthesis of insomnia, headache, heart seizure, listlessness, back pain and obsessiveness had produced a mood of deep pessimism. No one knew about this. He had always been secretive about his illnesses, except when he spoke to family members – and even with them he was not entirely forthcoming. But now, he recognised, something worse was happening to him than he had previously experienced. He was beginning, quietly, to panic and his thoughts turned to suicide.

He was frightened of dying the lingering death of paralysis; and for a long time he had been impressed by the similar decision in favour of self-destruction taken by Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue in 1911.11 For this purpose he turned to the steeliest of his comrades: Stalin. He could not depend on relatives to put aside their emotional ties. Nor would other comrades have the necessary hardness of heart. But Lenin extracted from Stalin a promise to give him poison at whatever time he should request it. He planned to be ready when, in his judgement, the moment came.12

This, however, he kept secret from the medical professionals whom he consulted in these months; he feared that they would interfere with his scheme. Nevertheless he trusted them with some of his other ruminations. This is not an unusual phenomenon, especially for people who have no religious belief and therefore no priest, minister or equivalent person to whom they can unburden themselves. Lenin, once he had decided he could trust Darkevich, blurted out:13

Every revolutionary, having reached the age of fifty, must be ready to leave for the side of the stage. [I] can no longer continue to work as before; it’s not only hard for [me] to carry out the duties of two people but it’s hard too to do just my own work; [I] don’t have the strength to answer for my own affairs. It’s this loss of working capacity, this fatal loss came up on me unnoticed: I’ve altogether stopped being a working person [rabotnik].

Lenin felt very depressed, saying that ‘his song was sung, his role played out’ and that he must hand on his post to someone else. He was also in intense pain: ‘A night doomed to insomnia is a truly terrible thing when you have to be ready in the morning for work, work, work without end…’14

Maria Ilinichna and the Ulyanovs’ family doctor Professor Gete were present and heard Lenin pour his heart out.15 Lenin’s choice of his sister rather than Nadezhda Konstantinovna to accompany him was significant; the coolness between him and his wife persisted. The consultation went on for four hours, and, when it was over, Darkevich gave his conclusions. He could find no ‘organic disease of the brain’ but rather a cerebral exhaustion. His proposed course of treatment was simple. Lenin needed a rest from intellectual and political work; he should take a break in the Moscow countryside and, if he liked, he could go hunting. He should give no more than one speech per month. Lenin was pleased. The shadow of an early death had passed from him. Maria Ilinichna thanked Darkevich, telling him that her brother had become ‘a totally different person’.16 In refreshed mood he kept up residence in the mansion at Gorki. Occasionally – for he would not keep strictly to Darkevich’s regime – he travelled back to Moscow. His zest was too much for his chauffeur Stepan Gil. Lenin wanted the Rolls-Royce to go faster whether or not there were ruts in the road. Gil obeyed, but drew the line at endangering animal life. Lenin upbraided him for unnecessary ‘reverence’ for roadside chickens. This was yet another of those displays of unfeelingness than caused the official censors to withhold any reference to the conversations between Gil and Lenin for nearly seventy years.

He appeared to be following his doctors’ advice. In 1921 there had been some discussion that Lenin might represent the Soviet government at the international conference planned for the following year at Genoa in northern Italy. Foreign newspapermen were already describing such a trip as an historic occasion. Outside Russia, hardly anyone knew much about Lenin. The British writers H. G. Wells and Bertrand Russell had interviewed him in 1920; their accounts left readers in no doubt that he was an extraordinary man and politician. Several very scurrilous books were also being published on contemporary Russia, and all had sections on Lenin. He was the object of the world’s fascination. Excitement at the possibility of glimpsing him was mounting, and for a while the official authorities in Moscow did nothing to quieten the speculation. Even if he had been fit, however, he was unlikely to have travelled. His own People’s Commissar of Foreign Trade Leonid Krasin warned him that Russian monarchists or Socialist-Revolutionaries might try to assassinate him. Lenin in response wrote from Gorki asking the Politburo to prohibit not only himself but also Trotski and Zinoviev from going. The risks were too great.17

It was decided at the last moment that Georgi Chicherin the Foreign Affairs People’s Commissar would represent the Soviet government. Lenin suspected that the Politburo in his absence might not be aware that Chicherin needed tight control from Moscow. Essentially Lenin had already rejected the possibility of a comprehensive international settlement in Genoa. His reasons were twofold: firstly, he did not want to have his hands tied in relation to internal economic policy, and he knew that this would be the price paid for any deal with the United Kingdom and France; secondly, he had no intention of consolidating the territorial and political arrangements imposed on Europe by the Treaties of Versailles, St Germain and Trianon. To Lenin it seemed obvious that Soviet long-term interests lay in creating divisions among the various capitalist countries. He got the Politburo to order Chicherin to lend priority not to a comprehensive post-war treaty but to a separate commercial and diplomatic treaty with Germany. On 16 April the Soviet delegation under Chicherin obtained what the Politburo wanted when the negotiations with the Germans at Rapallo, nineteen miles from Genoa, yielded a separate treaty. It was a triumph for Leninist diplomatic strategy. The way was clear for trade to be boosted with the other vanquished great power on the continent without ultimately forswearing the possibility of ‘European socialist Revolution’.

Chicherin had jibbed at his instructions and Lenin, with the bad temper that characterised him in these months, suggested that he had gone off his head and needed to be found a place in a lunatic asylum. This proposal was not taken seriously by the Politburo. Lenin frequently suggested that one or other of his comrades should be constrained to take a period of convalescence. To question a comrade’s mental health, however, was of a different order of significance. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that, in offering a long-range diagnosis of poor Chicherin, Lenin was really expressing fears for himself. As he had said to Professor Darkevich, he felt at times that he was going mad.

The negotiations in Genoa and Rapallo were not the sole topic that undammed a torrent of rage from Lenin. He was splenetic about internal politics. Terror, he was still insisting, was integral to state policy. The Soviet regime simply could not afford to abandon it even under the New Economic Policy. Quite the opposite: Lenin asserted that the economic retreat would succeed only if the maximum of political discipline and control was maintained. Ostensibly the secret police was to be restricted in its operations, and the Extraordinary Commission was replaced by the Main Political Administration (GPU). Kamenev was pushing for justice to be meted out on a more formal, open basis. But, as soon as he heard of any potential weakening of the party’s line, Lenin angrily intervened. ‘Bandits’ should be shot on the spot. ‘The speed and force of the repressions’ should be intensified. Any constitutional or legislative reforms should be formulated in such a fashion as to sanction the possibility of the death penalty being applied in cases involving ‘all aspects of activity by Mensheviks, S[ocialist]-R[evolutionaries], etc.’ He gave a warning that the regime should not be ‘caught napping by a second Kronstadt’. The Civil Code, he suggested, should enshrine ‘the essence and justification of terror’.

The peasant rebels of Tambov and elsewhere were still being attacked and quelled by the Red Army. In Georgia, the remnants of national resistance to the communists continued to be forcibly eliminated. Arrests of known officers of the White armies were still being carried out. Repression was conducted in abundance in the lands of ‘Soviet power’. But Lenin wanted the scope widened. In the first months of 1922 he advocated the final eradication of all remaining threats, real or potential, to his state. For Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks he demanded the staging of show trials followed by exemplary severe punishment. For the Russian Orthodox Church hierarchy, or for a substantial section of it, he demanded the same. For other hostile groups he was a little less harsh. But only a little. Anti-Bolshevik figures in the intelligentsia should be exiled or deported; and if Shlyapnikov and the Workers’ Oppositionists in his own party refused to given up their collective criticism of the Politburo, they should be thrown out of the party.

His interventions were extremely ill tempered. Bukharin and Radek on a visit to Berlin saw fit to promise that if Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks were put on trial they would not be executed. Lenin castigated them in Pravda for having made unnecessary concessions. When he demanded repression, he meant repression. He took an interest in every possible detail. Lists of victims were scrutinised, and his judgements were crudely punitive. A book edited by the Christian socialist philosopher and former Marxist Nikolai Berdyaev was dismissed as the literary front for ‘a White Guard organisation’.18 When he turned his attention to show trials of Orthodox Church bishops and priests, he went further: ‘The greater the number of the representatives of reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in shooting on this premise, the better. It is precisely now that we ought to deliver a lesson to this public so that they won’t dare even think about resistance for several decades.’ This was Lenin writing confidentially on the strategy to be adopted in order that no Soviet citizen should be under the illusion that the communist order might be induced to moderate its ferocious ideology. Alternative ways of organising society had to be extirpated. Non-Bolshevik socialism, religion and intellectual dissent were primary potential agencies for opposition, and Lenin was determined to grind them into the dust.

He obtained at least some of what he wanted. He got a show trial of Socialist Revolutionaries, but not of Mensheviks; and the death penalty, against his wishes, was not imposed. By contrast at the trial of Orthodox Church personnel the Politburo sanctioned the executions he had demanded. Above all, the principle of using the courts and the Cheka to traumatise the opposition to the one-party, one-ideology state was enthusiastically fulfilled.

But there remained a doubt that Darkevich’s reassuring diagnosis was correct across the range of symptoms. A succession of specialists came out to inspect him, including the surgeon Julius Borchardt and the physician Georg Klemperer from Germany at the daily rate of 20,000 marks apiece.19 The entire medical file on the man came under investigation: his childhood eyesight problems, the stomach ailments of early manhood, the headaches and insomnia, the St Anthony’s fire, the recent transient ischaemic attacks, the listlessness and the obsessions. The doctors were in a quandary. The only point of agreement was that rest alone would not restore him. Klemperer maintained that the bullet lodged in his neck since 1918 had to be removed if ever he was to be cured. The hypothesis was that the headaches were the result of the lead in the bullet poisoning the brain. (The fact that Lenin had suffered chronically from headaches before being shot outside the Mikhelson Factory was not taken into account.) It was noted how nervy Lenin was under medical examination, but this was thought to be a secondary problem resulting from overwork: neurasthenia. The main illness, according to Klemperer, was produced by the bullet’s toxic effects. Klemperer got his way even though Professor Vladimir Rozanov, with the support of Professor Borchardt, argued against the operation. Then Borchardt, having tried in vain to hand the surgical task to Rozanov, performed the operation at the Soldatenkov Hospital on 23 April.20

Thus the bullet was extracted, and when Lenin awoke next morning at eight o’clock the first signs were that Klemperer’s suggestion had proved successful. Lenin did not even feel pain in his neck.21 But unfortunately this encouraging situation did not last; scarcely had a month passed after the operation when, on 25 May 1922, Lenin suffered a massive stroke out at Gorki. He was picked up and put in his bed, and the doctors waited to see whether he would survive. The whole right side of his body was rendered immobile. He had difficulty speaking. His mind was confused; he was desperate. His recovery was obviously going to be long and uncertain. Fortunately the manor house had by then been well set up for the purpose, and Nadezhda Konstantinovna and Maria Ilinichna reorganised and reduced their other duties and shared the business of looking after him.

Lenin was again seen by doctors in rapid succession, and a great concilium of them took place on 29 May. Its members included Kozhevnikov, Rossolino and Kramer as well as the Ulyanov family doctor, Fëdor Gete, and the People’s Commissar of Health Nikolai Semashko. Some of them felt that Darkevich’s diagnosis of over-exhaustion had been wrong. But exactly what was wrong with Lenin? The neuropathologist A. M. Kozhevnikov, who had written a study of syphilis, conducted a Wassermann test on Lenin’s blood on 29 May. Next day his place was taken by the ophthalmologist Mikhail Averbakh. The official story was that these examinations conclusively rejected syphilis, especially when the Wassermann proved negative. But other symptoms left doubts. Presumably it was for this reason that Professors Kozhevnikov and Förster went on prescribing injections of arsenic-based preparations for Lenin, which was a conventional anti-syphilitic treatment at that time.22 Unfortunately, despite the mountain of information filed on Lenin at the time, the blood analyses have gone missing.23 These would tell present-day pathologists beyond peradventure whether he had syphilis, and their absence gives rise to the suspicion that the Soviet political leadership, wanting to preserve the image of Lenin as a morally pure individual, removed or destroyed embarrassing archives.

What can be stated with confidence is that some doctors thought that he had syphilis and others denied this. In the latter group remained Darkevich and he was joined by the neuropathologist Grigori Rossolino, a Russian of Italian descent. Rossolino bluntly told Lenin that he had been hoping that he was suffering from syphilis since it was at least curable. But, while some symptoms pointed in this direction, others surely did not. Professor Rossolino concluded that the illness was even more serious than syphilis and the general prognosis for the patient was grim.

The concilium of doctors whittled their discussions down to a small number of possibilities. One was that he had syphilis; this possibility continued to be discussed in 1923 when Professor A. Strumpel, Germany’s leading specialist on neurosyphilis, concluded that Lenin was suffering from ‘endarteriitis luetica’. This was the Latin term for a syphilitic inflammation of the artery linings.24 Another possibility was that he was suffering from ‘neurasthenia’, or nervous exhaustion, as the result of massive overwork. Almost certainly this was what had been said to him two decades previously by a Swiss specialist; and now Förster, while identifying toxin from the lead bullet as the primary problem, affirmed that neurasthenia too was harming him.25 The third possible diagnosis, according to some of the doctors, was that the surgical operation to remove the bullet from his neck had caused damage. Naturally Klemperer did not like this opinion since it was he who had recommended the operation. The fourth and last hypothesis was cerebral arteriosclerosis. Lenin’s father had reportedly died of it in 1886 and might well have passed on the condition to his son. The subsequent medical history of the other Ulyanovs was to point in the same direction. Anna Ilinichna travelled incognito across the border to Latvia in 1922 to a sanatorium, and she died after a stroke and chronic paralysis in 1935; two years later Maria Ilinichna failed to survive a heart attack, and Dmitri Ilich died of stenocardia – the constriction of the blood vessels joined to the heart – in 1943.26

Nor could the doctors discount the suggestion that Lenin was suffering from a combination of the various possibilities. In truth the patient’s condition baffled them and they continued to argue with each other. Only one idea united them. This was that Lenin had to cut down drastically on his political activity. A certain Professor Obukh was given the task of informing him. Failure to hearken to this advice, Lenin was told unequivocally, would result in another stroke or death. Lenin raised an objection that his daily routine was not one of great strain since he neither drank too much nor led ‘a dissolute life’.27 But Obukh would not budge. Lenin’s survival depended entirely on his taking a lengthy break from his public responsibilities. While outwardly agreeing to their recommendations, in reality he was planning to trick the medical staff. His own researches in the medical textbooks convinced him that there was no hope for him. Rather than suffer paralysis, he again determined to commit suicide, and on 30 May he summoned Stalin to Gorki. They kissed in the Russian manner on greeting. Then Lenin asked his visitor to get the poison to do the job. Stalin conferred with Bukharin and Maria Ilinichna outside the bedroom. They agreed that Stalin should go back and explain to Lenin that the prognosis of the optimistic doctors should be believed. On this occasion, Lenin agreed. He would delay killing himself a little longer.28

But what really was wrong with him? Medical science has progressed in the ensuing decades and would be able, if Lenin were now a patient, to diagnose his illness more easily. One of the possible causes would no longer be seriously entertained: neurasthenia. Today this condition, so readily diagnosed until the middle of the twentieth century, is seldom recognised as a genuine disease. Of the three main remaining diagnoses each has something plausible about it. If it were not for the negative result of the Wasserman test, syphilis would be a credible guess. If it were not for the fact that he had had minor strokes before 1922, the surgical removal of the bullet might be credible. Yet the fact remains that some of Lenin’s doctors believed he was syphilitic even though, apparently, he failed to come up positive on the Wasserman test. Nor can it be disproved that the operation on the bullet fatally worsened an existing condition. Then again perhaps Professor Osipov got it right when suggesting that Lenin was suffering from atherosclerosis or a ‘hardening of the arteries’. Often it is associated with a high pressure of blood against the arterial walls. The affected arteries in Lenin’s case, as was revealed after his death in 1924, were linked to the brain.

In the West this is scarcely a topic of intense interest. In Russia, however, the communist authorities propagated an image of Lenin as a morally pure individual, and the consequence is that many contemporary historians have been searching to prove that he died of a venereal disease.29 Thus it is implied that he was sexually promiscuous. It is an understandable quest. But it is driven by motives outside the limits of medical history. And until further information comes to light, no useful conclusion may be offered.

Whatever the causes, a major stroke had occurred. The only sensible restorative measure for Lenin was his complete retirement from active politics. Even this would not bring about a cure, only the postponement of a further stroke. But, if Lenin had thought this, he would have killed himself as he had planned. Instead he was persuaded by the medical team that they would be able to restore his health and enable him to return to the Politburo and Sovnarkom. He seemed genuinely cheerful as he began little by little to recover. He read books. He wrote notes to the Politburo. He began to potter around again, and took an interest in the agricultural work at Gorki. Above all, he was kept informed about Kremlin politics since Stalin, as the party’s General Secretary, travelled out to the Gorki sanatorium for face-to-face discussions. Maria Ilinichna was asked by Lenin to put out a bottle of red wine so as to make Stalin feel properly welcome. Sitting out on the sunny terrace, Lenin and Stalin could talk things over. Lenin aimed to reassure himself that all was well in the Politburo, Central Committee and Sovnarkom. For this purpose he had approved the election of Stalin as General Secretary, and the early signs were that Stalin had been a good choice.

There were abundant occasions for relaxation. A dog was obtained for him, Aida, which looked just like Zhenka, the dog he had owned in his Siberian exile.30 Lenin was delighted. He also took gentle strolls around the woods in search of mushrooms just as he had done when first he lived with Nadezhda Konstantinovna in Shushenskoe. They paid visits, too, to the state collective farm that had been carved out of the estate at Gorki. This was not quite so happy an experience since Lenin did not think that the farm chairman was very good at his job.31

But Lenin did not interfere. Instead he made his own arrangements for different forms of husbandry to be introduced to the area adjacent to the sanatorium. He was keen to foster rabbit-rearing and bee-keeping. ‘If I can’t get involved in politics,’ he said, ‘then I’ll have to get involved in agriculture.’32 He had faced the choice between agriculture and politics in Alakaevka in 1889–90 when his mother wanted him as her estate manager. Agriculture had been second best in his estimation at that time, and so it remained in 1922; for he did not genuinely intend to drop politics: he was using these hobbies as a way of passing the time before he returned to his Kremlin duties. Occasionally he made this clear. When the doctors insisted that he gave up work, he replied with huge pathos: ‘There’s nothing else I have.’33 Nothing, in his mind, should get in the way of his struggle to get back to normality in Moscow. He found, for example, that his nerves were set a-jangle when anyone played the piano in the house. His sensitivity to ambient sound had become more acute than ever, and Maria Ilinichna banned music from the house forthwith.34

His greatest pleasure came not from hobbies but from the presence of children. Dmitri Ulyanov’s young son Viktor frequently came out to stay with his Uncle Volodya. So, too, did the daughter of a Moscow female worker as well as Inessa Armand’s daughter Inna and son Alexander. They were by then in their twenties. It is clear that Lenin and Krupskaya would have loved to have had children of their own, and the visits of these young people brought them joy. They felt a responsibility for the Armands after Inessa’s death, and Lenin gave orders for them to be well looked after.35

Not everyone approved of the invitation to the Armands. Maria Ilinichna, by now a crabby spinster in her mid-forties, believed that her brother needed a respite from the social round and that every such visit had an adverse effect on him.36 It is also possible that she objected to these young people because of the relationship between Lenin and Inessa. Nadya, however, felt otherwise and a blazing row took place between the two women. Lenin, hearing Nadya’s report on the incident, became so upset that he began to be afflicted by one of his severe headaches.37 Lenin’s personal bodyguard Pëtr Pakaln could see no way round the problem but to request the removal of the Armands. But this was not the end of the matter. Later in the summer Nadya wrote again to ‘my sweet girl’ Inna Armand – the daughter of the deceased Inessa – inviting her to stay at Gorki:38

Well, why can’t you stay with us? On the contrary, this year we’re going to live in a more ‘family-like fashion’ and more ‘openly’ since it’s impossible to occupy V.I. more than eight hours a day and anyway there’s need of a break twice a week. Therefore he’ll be delighted to have guests. He was very concerned when I told him you were ill and wrote a special letter to Zhidelëv about you and about [one of his secretaries] Lidia Alexandrovna [Fotieva], asking him to look after you.

It is hard to believe that Nadya was inventing Lenin’s thoughts out of the air. She recognised that the visits were truly important for him, and wanted to help him.

The disagreeable atmosphere was stoked up but not created by the dispute about the children. Nadya and Maria were forever struggling with each other. Any little incident could touch off an explosion. In July 1922, the Bolshevik editor Nikolai Meshcheryakov had visited Lenin for two hours. Lenin’s bodyguard Pëtr Pakaln observed the scene:39

But, since comrade Meshcheryakov was not offered any tea during his visit, Nadezhda Konstantinovna complained to Ilich, who became terribly distraught and on the same day issued a rebuke to Maria and also to Sasha [the maid] for their lack of attention to visitors, and he ordered them henceforth to feed everyone coming to the house.

Maria’s recollection of the events was different. Lenin’s reaction had indeed been sharp: ‘A comrade travelled out to a house like this and no one could even give him a bite to eat.’ But Maria disclaimed responsibility, saying that she had been ‘hoping’ that Nadya would look after Meshcheryakov. According to Maria, Lenin’s reply was: ‘Well, she’s too well-known a slattern [fefëla] for anyone to rely on her.’40 While this was hardly an expression of total support for his sister, it was abusive language to use about his wife.

Nadya and Maria, his wife and his sister, were fighting for possession of Lenin. Each whispered in his ear about the shortcomings of the other. It would seem that he did not want to take sides openly and definitively. He had always used the interplay of emotions among his relatives to his advantage. The problem in mid-1922 was that he was no longer in a dominant position because of ill health. What he most needed was that Nadya and Maria calm down and find a modus vivendi. In subsequent months they composed themselves; but they continued to take opposite approaches to his convalescence. Maria thought it stupid of Professor Klemperer, who had not covered himself with glory by instigating surgery upon Lenin in April, to let him read newspapers and talk to visiting politicians.41 By contrast Nadya felt that without this minimal political activity he would become demoralised, and she complied – even colluded – with his requests for information.

Nadya was bound to hold sway, if only because she was doing what her wilful husband wanted. She also had a better way of managing him. Maria taught herself how to take photographs in order to record her brother’s appearance for posterity;42 but it was Nadya who sat with him for hours and talked him round to feeling that he might recover. She helped him, too, with the manual exercises that his doctors said would be necessary. Basket weaving was among these.43 The road to recuperation was bestrewn with obstacles. One day Lenin was progressing and seemed almost as he had been before the stroke of May 1922. The next day he could be hobbling or worse. He collapsed frequently, and had to be carried back to his bedroom. His mood, not surprisingly, was volatile. He raged to get back to the Kremlin and to resume control. He had always been reluctant to allow others to take supreme command, and the enforced convalescence made him exceedingly edgy. At the slightest resistance to his wishes, he could fly into a temper. He had had this potential even before, but in this period he was very irritable and obsessive. But, although he had admitted this to Professor Darkevich in March, he did not and probably could not restrain himself.

Thus in July he announced the need for a transformation of the entire Central Committee with its twenty-seven members elected under his aegis at the Eleventh Party Congress. He had the gall to suggest that the Central Committee should be cut down to just three members and that none of the most influential party leaders – Trotski, Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Dzierżyński and Bukharin – should belong to it. His proposed Central Committee would consist of Central Committee Secretaries Molotov and Kuibyshev and Sovnarkom Deputy Chairman Rykov. As an additional insult, he suggested that Kamenev, Zinoviev and Lenin’s least favourite colleague in the previous year, Tomski, should serve under them as candidate members. Lenin’s pretext was that the Central Committee as presently constituted was too tired to discharge its functions properly. Its members, too, needed a period of convalescence.44 The outrageous criticism of his colleagues’ efficiency barely concealed an implicit claim that he alone had the talent to run the Central Committee. It was a claim to which he returned in the last weeks of 1922 when he dictated what became known as his Political Testament. His external modesty was often charming; but underneath lay the arrogance of the person who believes in his natural right to be the supreme leader.

The scheme for a three-man Central Committee was harebrained. Molotov, Kuibyshev and Rykov would have lacked the necessary authority to impose themselves on the other leaders; and, furthermore, there was nothing in the Party Rules to validate the replacement of a Central Committee in the interim between Congresses. Lenin had lost his sense of political proportion – and the Central Committee had reason on its side in refusing to dignify his scheme with a written rebuttal. The founder of the Bolshevik party and the Soviet state was best ignored until he came back to psychological normality.

27. DISPUTING TO THE LAST September to December 1922

Despite being stuck in Gorki and feeling very poorly, Lenin still expected to dominate the making of policy. In the early months of 1922 there had been discussion on four matters of acute concern to him. On two of them he had largely obtained satisfaction before his stroke in May. The first matter had been the Genoa Conference. Without undue dissent, the Politburo accepted his guidance and gave priority to a German–Soviet agreement at the expense of pursuing a comprehensive settlement with the European powers in general. The second involved the modalities of political control in Russia. Lenin convinced his Politburo colleagues that the time was ripe to strike at the enemies of the Soviet state: the Socialist-Revolutionaries, the Mensheviks, the Russian Orthodox Church and the leading anti-Bolshevik figures in philosophy, arts and scholarship. Not every detail of policy had gone his way, but he was not balked on broad strategy. It was on the third and fourth matters that he encountered trouble in the central party leadership. One related to the limits of the state monopoly on foreign trade, the other to the inter-republican constitutional structure of the Soviet state. Neither of these matters was of fundamental significance. But the dispute over them exposed fissures in the party leadership that continued to have an impact many years later.

Stalin was among Lenin’s opponents in the discussions of both foreign trade and the constitution. On the foreign-trade monopoly, Stalin simply went along with the majority in the Politburo. On the constitution, however, it was Stalin who led the opposition to Lenin. Stalin the Party General Secretary. Stalin the man whom Lenin had used as his conduit of instructions to the Politburo. Stalin who had been Lenin’s ally in the internal party disputes of 1920–1. Stalin the adjutant and the loyalist. It was this same Stalin who was challenging Lenin’s supremacy over policy.

Lenin was highly agitated by the proposal to repeal the state monopoly. Vladimir Milyutin and Grigori Sokolnikov, his colleagues in the Central Committee, argued that private commerce across the borders would promote internal economic regeneration. Lenin disapproved, insisting that the NEP (New Economic Policy) should be kept within the limits he had established in 1921. The Soviet state, he urged, should keep its monopoly over large-scale industry, banking and foreign trade. Previously he had been the one who had insisted that the Politburo should be pragmatic and should broaden the framework of the NEP. This is what Milyutin and Sokolnikov thought they were doing by suggesting that capitalists should be able to export and import certain goods without going through state trading institutions; and they added that the monopoly in practice induced smuggling by private traders. Among the supporters of Milyutin and Sokolnikov were some of Lenin’s most prominent colleagues: Kamenev, Bukharin and Stalin. Yet Lenin persuaded himself that the debate on foreign trade involved matters of profound principle and was determined to keep the party in line with his particular version of the NEP.

The second great topic for discussion in summer 1922 was Stalin’s proposal for a new constitutional structure for the Soviet state. Lenin and Stalin had already quarrelled about this in 1920.1 Stalin believed that best plan was for the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic (RSFSR) to incorporate all the other independent Soviet republics within its territory. Ukraine, Belorussia, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia would become part of the RSFSR. Lenin violently disagreed, and advocated the formation of a Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia. In such a Union the RSFSR would be merely one Soviet republic alongside the Soviet republics of Ukraine, Belorussia, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia.

Struggle was joined over both foreign trade and the constitution. Lenin’s opponents felt bewildered since none of them genuinely proposed to dismantle the entirety of the state’s foreign-trade monopoly. Their objective was not total but partial repeal. Lenin not only misrepresented their purpose but also treated them as if they had offended the tenets of Marxism – and he targeted Sokolnikov with a tirade of personal abuse. Equally disconcerting was Lenin’s approach to the state constitution. He did not aim to weaken Moscow’s strict party and governmental control over the ‘borderlands’. Lenin and Stalin were at one in their commitment to the one-party, one-ideology multinational state. Their disagreements affected secondary rather than primary aspects of policy. Yet Lenin saw fit to attack Stalin and his supporters in language of extreme bitterness, and Politburo members were at a loss to explain why.

Leading party members put this down to the effects of illness and to his distance from day-to-day political management. Even in the discussions over the Genoa Conference and over domestic political repression – discussions in which he got his way – he had been unpleasant to Georgi Chicherin, Nikolai Bukharin and Karl Radek. Thus his ill temper belonged to a pattern and his doctors were long accustomed to this. In June 1922 he had written to the Politburo demanding that he should be ‘liberated’ from Professor Klemperer and be ‘rid of’ Professor Förster, and he added: ‘Russians cannot put up with German meticulousness.’2 To his colleagues, this attitude appeared a little disingenuous since he had always been meticulous in his personal and working habits and had called upon others to be the same. If anyone – apart from Trotski – appeared to conform to the Russian popular stereotype of a German, it was Lenin. If anyone had been prominent in comparing Russians unfavourably with Germans, it had been Lenin. Unsurprisingly the Politburo ignored his request to send the German specialists back to Germany and grew accustomed to soothing him in the hope that, as he got better, he would become a more manageable colleague.

But Lenin saw things differently; he began to identify Stalin as the universal villain. In 1912 he had admired him as ‘the wonderful Georgian’,3 and after the October Revolution had assigned to him tasks of state that required a ruthless, crude energy. But of Stalin’s other characteristics he had a low opinion. Stalin had habits that Lenin thought vulgar and unpleasant. Once, when Stalin had been puffing on his pipe, Lenin blurted out: ‘Look at the Asiatic – all he can do is go on sucking!’ Stalin knocked out his pipe in deference.4 It was unusual for Lenin to be so rude; he had been brought up to have decent social manners. Furthermore, he needed comrades to believe he thought well of them, and could see how upset people were by Trotski or Zinoviev. Within Lenin the blunt revolutionary there survived Lenin the fastidious European Russian gentleman; he was a bit of a snob in national, social and cultural terms.

It was only when his guard was down that he allowed this to show. In earlier days Lenin had acted differently, as Maria Ilinichna noted:5

V.I. had a lot of self-restraint. And he knew very well how to disguise and not reveal his attitude to people when he felt this to be for any reason more sensible… All the more did he hold himself back in relation to comrades with whom his work brought him into contact. The cause for him had priority; he knew how to subordinate the personal to the cause and this personal element never obtruded or took precedence with him.

Now the angry contempt he felt for Stalin was removing such inhibitions. Maria Ilinichna was to try to warn him that his opponent was more intelligent and therefore more dangerous than he imagined. But Lenin would have none of it: ‘He is absolutely not intelligent!’ Thus spake the brilliant gimnazia student, the polyglot émigré and chief party ideologist. He was about to learn, in the last lesson of his political life, that intelligence was not monopolised by those who had formal cultural proficiency.

The scene was set for three political battles. Two of them intensified in the course of the summer: the struggle over the state monopoly of foreign trade and the struggle over the new constitution. In both cases Lenin identified Stalin as a standard-bearer of the campaign against the policies that had his approval. The third battle was a product of the others. And it was a struggle that Lenin had not anticipated that he would have to fight. This was the battle he eventually decided was necessary if he was to remove Iosif Stalin from the Party General Secretaryship.

These were battles that would barely have merited a footnote in the history of Soviet communism if Lenin’s health had not deteriorated. The chances are that Lenin would simply have unseated ‘the wonderful Georgian’ from the Secretariat and replaced him with a more compliant official. Stalin would have endured a period of quiet humiliation. Even so, it is doubtful that Stalin’s career would have been entirely over. For example, he would surely have retained membership of the Central Committee. Lenin had not been able to push out Tomski in 1921, even though Tomski had flouted a Central Committee policy. was guilty of no such delinquency in 1922. It was not, after all, against the rules of the party to disagree with Lenin. Nor was Stalin alone in advocating the policies that Lenin found annoying. As was usual when Lenin did not get his way, he became abusive to his rivals. The pathos of Lenin’s medical condition has tended to deflect attention from the merits of the argument between the two men across that long, hot summer. We have also been affected by our retrospective knowledge of what horrors – horrors of which Lenin had no presentiment – Stalin went on to commit in the 1930s and subsequently.

Yet the discussions about the future constitution produced the first clash. Unease existed among communists in the Soviet republics about Stalin’s plan to incorporate their republics in the RSFSR. The Georgian Central Committee was outspoken. Lenin disliked Stalin’s project and suspected that Stalin was bullying the Soviet republics into accepting it. Stalin wrote to Lenin in self-justification. Lenin, he felt, ought to understand that nationalism was on the rise in the borderlands and that Lenin’s scheme would only encourage it and increase the complexity of administrative structures. Stalin wanted to give Soviet republics ‘autonomous’ status within the RSFSR and prevent them from entering a federal arrangement on equal terms with the RSFSR. A Party Orgburo commission ratified Stalin’s project on 23 September 1922.

Lenin hated the idea of ‘autonomisation’, likening it to ‘Great Russian chauvinism’. When he told Stalin of his position three days later in a conversation that lasted two hours, Stalin caved in and agreed to the abandonment of ‘autonomisation’ and the formation of a Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia. This was the sort of project that Lenin had advocated in discussion with Stalin himself in mid-1920. Yet Stalin had not thrown in the towel. He wrote a note next day to the Politburo and proposed that the Union should not have separate organs of legislation from those of the RSFSR. He also tweaked Lenin by changing the proposed name to Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Furthermore, he insisted that Georgia should join Armenia and Azerbaijan in a Transcaucasian Soviet Federation and that this Federation should enter the USSR on a par with the RSFSR and the Ukrainian Soviet Republic; thus he set his face against Georgia retaining a status equal to that of the RSFSR. Kamenev warned Stalin to desist from being provocative: ‘Ilich has girt himself up for war in defence of [Soviet republican] independence.’ Stalin was undismayed, and in the process showed himself as a leader in the making: ‘What is needed, in my opinion, is that firmness is shown against Ilich.’

When Kamenev told him that he was only making things worse than they absolutely had to be, Stalin professed indifference; but, sure enough, Lenin had got his gander up: ‘I declare war to the death on Great Russian chauvinism.’ After a summer of convalescence, he was determined to return to the fray in Moscow. This was stupid of him because his recovery from the stroke had been interrupted by further collapses. In June he had had one after walking round the park at Gorki, and in July he had had another after doing the same thing and he lost the use of the right side of his body. In August, too, he had days of incapacity.6 He pushed himself hard and resumed his intellectual work. Secretaries were sent scurrying to libraries for the books he wanted – in particular, he asked for Bukharin’s The ABC of Communism.7 He also started a contribution to Anna Ilinichna’s collection of memoirs on his old Marxist friend from his Kazan days, Nikolai Fedoseev.8 He overcame the objections of the doctors and the doubts of the Politburo, and on 2 October 1922 he left the Gorki mansion and returned by car to the Kremlin, where he resumed the occupancy of his apartment next to the Sovnarkom rooms in the old Senate Building. Next day he chaired the regular Sovnarkom meeting and on 6 October he did the same at the Party Central Committee plenum. He tried to impress everybody with his ability to take up his official duties again.

Yet Lenin was nothing like his old self and could not fool his colleagues when he had to keep up appearances at these two important meetings. His colleagues tried to avoid controversy at the Sovnarkom session. But this served only to agitate him.9 They could do nothing right. If they disputed with Lenin, he might have another heart seizure; if they held back, the result might still be the same because he became irritated by their very politeness. The Central Committee plenum started better, but halfway through the proceedings he had a bout of toothache and had to withdraw to his apartment.10 Although he returned for other meetings in the following days, his performance was well below normal. This in turn made him acutely nervous and he got angry at the least disturbance. His secretary Lidia Fotieva dreaded another heart attack and discreetly asked his leading colleagues not to get up from their seats or talk among themselves in meetings. Every conceivable cause of agitation had to be eliminated.11 His mental capacity had been impaired. Sometimes he lost his place while speaking from a text and was known to repeat whole passages without knowing it.

Kamenev, Stalin and Zinoviev met to discuss his condition but came to no decision leading to action.12 They knew that, if they ordered him back to the mansion at Gorki, he would accuse them of using his illness as a pretext for eliminating him from the discussions on foreign trade and the constitution. And so they left him alone. In fact he was already on the way to getting what he wanted on the constitution. At the Central Committee plenum on 6 October, he had had the support of Bukharin and Kamenev, and Stalin had not dared to oppose his basic demands. Only one concession had come from Lenin’s side, and this was hardly a momentous one: he had accepted that the Soviet state should be designated not the Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia but the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. A party commission was established under Stalin to prepare the final text for the Congress of Soviets in December. Lenin meanwhile sent a message to Kamenev asking him to enable the Georgian communists to have access to the relevant documents in defence of their position. He wanted to clip the wings of Iosif Stalin.13

Lenin went on pushing himself to the limit and addressed the Fourth Comintern Congress on 13 November. The speech was incoherent in passages, but he had just enough energy and experience to get through to the end. His friends, however, were alarmed about his worsened condition. Bukharin wrote:14

Our hearts were sinking when Ilich walked out on to the platform. We all saw what effort his speech cost Ilich. Then we saw him finish. I ran over to him and embraced him under my fur coat; he was completely wet from exhaustion, his shirt was drenched and there were beads of sweat on his forehead. His eyes suddenly rolled around.

The Comintern delegates applauded Lenin without suspecting that his recovery was in jeopardy. The foreign delegates in particular wanted to see and hear the man under whose leadership they expected communism to triumph around the world. But his fellow central party leaders had erred in allowing him to give a speech, and they knew it. After the Comintern Congress they increasingly tried to restrict his activities, regardless of his wishes. By then they were wondering, in their confidential discussions, whether his disease – whatever it was – was ever going to release its grip on him.

Stalin and his friends felt freer to do as they pleased. The Georgian communist leaders had annoyed Stalin beyond measure and Ordzhonikidze, close ally of Stalin, denounced them at a meeting in Tbilisi as ‘chauvinistic filth’. The Georgian Central Committee protested by resigning en masse and complaining to Lenin. For a while Lenin took no notice since he too objected to the Georgian communist leadership’s demand that Georgia should not be included in a Transcaucasian Federation. He also consented to Stalin’s plan to send a commission of enquiry under Dzierżyński to investigate the situation in Georgia. The tension among communists in Tbilisi was enormous. In late November, Ordzhonikidze was so enraged at being accused of acting like an imperial emissary that he beat up a certain Kobachidze, who was an adherent of Mdivani. Lenin was worried about Georgia even though he had no accurate knowledge of events there, and pestered his secretaries to find out when Dzierżyński was scheduled to return. In fact Dzierżyński agreed with Stalin on the constitutional question and his report whitewashed the behaviour of Ordzhonikidze in the Transcaucasus. But, when Dzierżyński had a chat with Lenin back in Moscow on 12 December, he could not stop himself blurting out what had happened to the unfortunate Kobachidze.

For Lenin it was clear that Stalin had not surrendered on the USSR constitution and that he had to resume the battle he thought won on 6 October. There was more to this than fighting to restore an agreed official policy. Stalin’s protection of Ordzhonikidze had involved him in condoning violence by one party official against another. Lenin was aghast. As long ago as 1903 he had dragged back Alexander Shotman from beating up a Menshevik on the streets of London. Now he objected to Ordzhonikidze on grounds not merely of stupidity but also of morality.

Usually Lenin had scoffed at moral codes of any kind. But at heart he was a romantic, a revolutionary believer. There were some things – just a few – that a Marxist should not do even under provocation. Marxists should be dedicated to Marxism and not take their ideas lightly. Marxists should be fighters and could assault each other verbally, but the idea that they should take to fisticuffs in order to settle a mutual grievance was anathema to him. Marxists should set an example of civil decency, and Ordzhonikidze had disgraced the party by his physical assault on Kobachidze. Already in 1920 Lenin had upbraided Ordzhonikidze for going on a drunken binge and carrying on with a group of loose women.15 Every Politburo member knew of Ordzhonikidze’s waywardness, and Lenin held it against Stalin and Dzierżyński that they had concealed the truth from him. Everything he learned about the treatment of the Georgian communist leadership pointed in the same direction: Stalin was presiding over a movement towards an authoritarian chauvinism inside the party. It did not matter that Stalin was himself a Georgian. He had acted like a Russian imperialist, and this was scandalous.

Lenin would have resumed the campaign against Stalin if he had not suffered yet another medical crisis. He underwent five collapses between 24 November and 2 December.16 On 13 December, the day after his conversation with Dzierżyński, he suffered two severe collapses and there were fears that he would not survive the.17 Dr Kozhevnikov and Professor Kramer, who hurried round to attend him, told him that he would not survive unless he agreed to a regime of ‘complete rest’. Their unwilling patient at last gave his consent. He called in his secretary Lidia Fotieva and made arrangements for the ‘liquidation of his affairs’.18

He had thought often enough that his illness was fatal; but from this day, he was also improvising how to leave his impact upon his party and upon the Revolution. He refused to be taken to Gorki, where he knew it would be difficult to maintain any kind of political role. He left his medical specialists and attendants in no doubt about his intentions. He would continue to live in the Kremlin and, since he could not write legibly, he would ask his Sovnarkom secretaries to take down dictation. He understood that he might suddenly perish and that, if he wished to leave a legacy, he had to write some kind of political testament. For this purpose he had to ponder whom he should recommend as his successor – or successors. The future of the Revolution dominated his thinking. Indeed it had done so for months. In autumn 1922 his agitation made him exclaim to Maria Ilinichna: ‘What scoundrel among us is going to live until the age of sixty?’ Then he had explained his desire that power, when he died, should somehow be passed from his own generation to those Bolsheviks who were in their twenties.19

Lenin’s concerns about the Revolution had burgeoned. His two remaining preoccupations with policy – on foreign trade and on the non-Soviet republics – had been joined by a political animus against Stalin. Nor was he convinced that his colleagues continued to share his priority for the maintenance of internal repression. It was beginning to seem to Lenin, in his weakened and febrile condition, that the agreed policies of the Politburo were being eroded. As he faced the probability of his imminent death, he was troubled by the general problem of ensuring that the Revolution would flourish when he was gone. Time was not on his side.

He called Fotieva to his Kremlin apartment after Kozhevnikov and Kramer had left at midday on 13 December. He was worrying less about collapsing again than about the policies of the central party leadership. One letter was about the elderly ex-Menshevik historian N. A. Rozhkov, whom Lenin had tried for months to have deported or at least exiled to Pskov (where Lenin had been confined in 1900 after his release from Siberia). Lenin treated the Politburo’s postponement of this decision as a sign of a growing reluctance to sanction his strategy of appropriate repression, and he demanded that Rozhkov should finally be deported.20 A second letter was sent to Trotski and others about the foreign-trade monopoly.21 A third, which was about the delegation of his Sovnarkom functions, went to Kamenev, Rykov and Tsyurupa. He also talked for two hours face to face with Stalin,22 who was left in no doubt about Lenin’s obstinacy. While being reconciled to devolving his day-to-day executive responsibilities, Lenin had not abandoned hope of giving the main speech to the Congress of Soviets.23 No deviation from his preferred policies, it was clear, was going to be tolerated. Stalin agreed to withdraw his opposition to the state foreign-trade monopoly,24 but still Lenin did not feel confident about the policy and he waited anxiously for the Central Committee to resolve the matter in his favour.

Extreme circumstances called for desperate measures. No longer having an ally in Stalin, Lenin turned to the very person against whom he had formed the alliance with Stalin. This was Trotski. Like Lenin, Trotski supported the state foreign-trade monopoly, and Lenin asked him to speak on his behalf at the forthcoming Central Committee plenum.25

This was an unprecedented manoeuvre. Previously Lenin had tried to keep a wide group of allies on his side and had avoided showing a definite preference for any one of them. Even his calculated choice of Stalin as ally in April 1922 had not implied a deliberate self-distancing from Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin. By achieving this rapprochement with Trotski, he was effectively indicating that this relationship in internal party affairs was to take precedence over all others. Such a manoeuvre was a token of Lenin’s desperation. Trotski’s vanity and arrogance had annoyed him before the February 1917 Revolution. The Brest-Litovsk negotiations, in Lenin’s eyes, had shown Trotski as a revolutionary poseur and the ‘trade union discussion’ inside the party in 1920–1 had demonstrated his recklessness and impracticality. Lenin could not bring himself to like him. At times he had turned ‘white as chalk’ in anger at Trotski’s polemical style in the central party leadership. Such arrogance seemed unnecessary to Lenin (who was incapable of recognising his own arrogance). But this had to be put to one side. Realpolitik demanded that Lenin should overcome his distaste and work harmoniously with Trotski.

The need became greater on 16 December, when Lenin’s condition deteriorated further and for a while he completely lost mobility in his right arm and right leg.26 Without Trotski at the Central Committee plenum on 18 December he had no guarantee that his colleagues would keep the foreign-trade monopoly. Despite his own physical pain, Lenin’s mind was focussed on politics. Perhaps he already was thinking that if Trotski proved reliable at the plenum he might be able to use him in other policy discussions. Even so, he still did not completely trust him and asked another Central Committee member, Yemelyan Yaroslavski, to report to him about the proceedings.27 In the event the Central Committee went Lenin’s way with ease.28 After the state monopoly on foreign trade was reaffirmed, Lenin wrote ecstatically to his new ally Trotski: ‘It’s as if we’ve managed to seize a position by a simple movement of manoeuvre and without having to fire a single shot.’29 In the evening session, the broad lines of Lenin’s project for a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) were passed.30 By then he had also had the pleasure of learning that the Politburo had agreed to his demand for Rozhkov’s exile to Pskov.31 One by one, Lenin’s objectives in policy were being met.

But he still had several to achieve, and he recognised that he could not assume that he had long to live. He was right to be sceptical, especially about Stalin. On 21 December the Orgburo, of which Stalin was the leading member, ratified the Dzierżyński report on Georgia. Ordzhonikidze had escaped without censure; and, just as disturbingly, the decision was taken to withdraw Mdivani and Stalin’s other opponents from their posts in Tbilisi.32 Stalin was out for revenge and was bent upon emasculating the agreement he had made with Lenin on the formalities of the USSR Constitution. There was bound eventually to be another spat between Stalin and Lenin. The tension mounted.

In the night of 22–23 December, Lenin’s health broke down again when he suffered another collapse and again lost the use of his whole right side. His relatives and doctors attended to him as best they could, but Lenin as ever was thinking about politics as soon as he regained consciousness. He had to employ low cunning since the Central Committee on 18 December had formally ordered him to withdraw from public life until he had recovered, and Stalin had been put in charge of this medical regime. Lenin, however, told his doctors that he feared he would not be able to get back to sleep unless he was allowed to dictate something to a secretary on ‘a question troubling him’. The doctors relented and duty secretary Maria Volodicheva was summoned to the apartment. He was still very poorly when she arrived. But he insisted on going ahead: ‘I want to dictate to you a letter to the congress.’33 Although he could manage only four minutes’ dictation, he had set the pattern; over the next few days, he hoped, he would put down in writing the general concerns and plans he had in mind and would make them available to the next Party Congress. Everything was to be ‘absolutely secret’. The letter was typed out in five copies that were sealed in envelopes with a wax seal; Lenin stipulated that only he or, in the event of his death, Nadezhda Konstantinovna should have the right to open them.34

He had complete trust in his secretaries Lidia Fotieva and Maria Volodicheva. Previously he had also been using the secretarial services of Nadezhda Allilueva, Stalin’s young second wife; but, by a favourable accident, she had ceased performing such work for him since the beginning of the month. Lenin was cheered, furthermore, by the decision of Stalin, Kamenev and Bukharin on 24 December to allow him to go on dictating for five to ten minutes a day. Stalin had recognised that, if permission were to be refused, Lenin retained the capacity to do him harm by complaining that he was being unreasonably constrained.

Yet Stalin was wrong to think that he ran no serious risk by allowing the dictation. Lenin, crippled and distraught, was also angry. His bedridden existence did nothing to calm him down. He was a man in a hurry. For a couple of years he had contemplated the question of the Soviet political succession and occasionally he had given voice to this. He and Alexander Shlikhter had talked about the deaths of several of their Bolshevik acquaintances in late summer 1921. Shlikhter had said that the party need not worry about the loss of the veterans since the younger generation was ready to take over. Lenin had demurred: ‘For a long, long time Lenin looked in silence without taking his eyes off me. “No, you’re wrong,” was his reply, “It’s still too early to leave. Five more years of training are needed.”’35 These words were not casually spoken; they reflected his unease about the kind of leadership available in the party once he had left the scene. Subsequently Lenin had avoided the topic. But, fearing that he would soon die, he rushed to commit his conclusions to paper. The effort this required was enormous. He tried to prepare his argument carefully so that he would not need to redraft it. He was writing a political testament for his party and the intentions had to be expressed with clarity.

As a writer he had been used to seeing his text emerge in front of him as he wrote it out in longhand, and of course it did not help that he was so ill. Sometimes his grammar went awry and Volodicheva had to correct his drafts. She knew he found this demeaning: ‘I know that I’m your necessary evil, but it’s only for a short time.’36 The problem, however, was that he had to get the contents right in his own mind and the stenographers often had to wait endlessly for his next sentence. At one point they experimented with putting the secretary in the room adjacent to Lenin’s, and having him ring them up when he had composed his thoughts.37

One way or another he was determined to finish his testament. While Fotieva and Volodicheva supplied him with technical help, they also tried to boost his morale. Of even greater emotional importance to him were Nadezhda Konstantinovna and Maria Ilinichna. Wife and sister made sure that they were available to sit with him each day. Nadezhda Konstantinovna went further and became his unofficial political assistant. This was against the terms of the medical regime decreed by the Central Committee and overseen by General Secretary Stalin. But Nadezhda Konstantinovna enjoyed the fact that she could again fulfil the role of his political assistant, a role she had given up in April 1917. Perhaps she relished the secretiveness; it was a bit like the old days when the two of them had conspired to fool the Okhrana. Above all, Nadezhda Konstantinovna recognised that, if the Central Committee shut Lenin off from politics as the Central Committee demanded, he would not last long. He could not live without politics. She therefore went on telling him what she knew about events in the Kremlin and putting him in confidential contact with other party leaders. Steadily his feeling of well-being returned to him.

Unfortunately Stalin found out about this on 22 December. He rang up Nadezhda Konstantinovna and abused her in the language of the gutter. Nadezhda Konstantinovna, troubled by Lenin’s condition, was overwhelmed by Stalin. Next day she wrote an impassioned letter to Kamenev: ‘In all the past 30 years I’ve not heard a single obscene word from any individual comrade; the interests of the party and Ilich are no less dear to me than to Lenin.’ Thus did she defend her husband’s right to remain politically active and indicated that Stalin would repeat his aggression at his own peril. And Lenin, while there was breath in his body, could initiate his plan to bequeath a legacy of ideas, strategy and personnel to the Communist Party and the Soviet state.

28. DEATH IN THE BIG HOUSE 1923–1924

Lenin began dictating his political testament on 23 December 1922. He wanted to present his ideas in person to the next Party Congress, but would leave a testament in case this was impossible. His opening words ran as follows: ‘I would very much advise the undertaking at this Congress of a series of changes in our political structure.’ Lenin put forward two proposals. The first was that the State Planning Commission, which currently advised on economic policy, should be given a degree of legislative authority. The second was that the Party Central Committee should be increased from twenty-seven to between fifty and one hundred members.1

There was a political calculus behind this. The State Planning Commission’s reform would strengthen the government’s direction of the economy: Lenin was trying to make further use of his recent alliance with Trotski and had to pay a price. For Trotski had been demanding a reinforcement of the state’s economic planning role. At the same time Lenin wanted to place a constraint on Trotski and the rest of his colleagues. To this end he urged the expansion of the Central Committee by introducing industrial workers to its membership. Lenin believed that action was needed to prevent conflicts in the central party leadership that might threaten the existence of the party and the survival of the Revolution.2 In his next period of dictation with secretary Maria Volodicheva, he sketched the prospect of a split in the party. He had little faith in the efficacy of the Tenth Party Congress’s ban on factional activity. The October Revolution, he stated, rested upon the support of two social classes, the workers and the peasants, and he insisted that the differing interests of these classes could become the basis for one section of the party leadership to engage in ruinous conflict with another.3

Lenin turned to the individuals who might head such sections: Trotski and Stalin. He was far from welcoming Trotski as his sole successor even though he was presently his main ally. The testament proceeded idiosyncratically. Lenin was suggesting, as no one else at the time was doing, that Stalin might be a serious contender for the succession. Trotski, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin had a sharper public profile than Stalin, who was ridiculed by the great historian of 1917, Nikolai Sukhanov, as a ‘grey blur’.

Lenin was able to evaluate Stalin more accurately after recent experiences and had long ago known of the deficiencies of Trotski:4

Comrade Stalin, having become General Secretary, has concentrated unlimited power in his hands, and I am not convinced that he will always manage to use this power with sufficient care. On the other hand, comrade Trotski, as is shown by his struggle against the Central Committee in connection with the question of the People’s Commissariat of the Means of Communication, is characterised not only by outstanding talents. To be sure, he is personally the most capable person in the present Central Committee but he also overbrims with self-confidence and with an excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of things.

Continuing with these thumbnail characterisations, Lenin asserted that the behaviour of Grigori Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev before the October 1917 seizure of power had been no accident (although he added, rather paradoxically, that this should not be held against them). He castigated Nikolai Bukharin’s ideas as scholastic and not entirely Marxist. He accused Georgi Pyatakov of taking too administrative an approach to politics.5 Deftly Lenin had put his colleagues to the test and found each unsatisfactory. His implicit but unmistakable conclusion was that there was no single leader in the party worthy of succeeding him.

The hypocrisy here was stunning. Lenin too had ruled with insufficient care (Stalin), had been addicted to administrative methods (Trotski and Pyatakov), had opposed revolutionary over-optimism (Zinoviev and Kamenev) and had exhibited a dubious grasp of Marxist orthodoxy (Bukharin). Yet Lenin now contended – and obviously believed – that only his comrades were guilty of these inadequacies.

In the past he had avoided general criticism of a comrade unless a rupture of political ties was involved, and such was the affection for him among his comrades that general criticism of Lenin by one of them was almost unknown. Almost, but not quite unknown. In 1921 he had had a spat with Pyatakov about the desirability of inviting American concessionnaires to take over the Donbass coalmines. Pyatakov, according to Lenin, exhibited ‘a boastfulness and an adherence to the bad old Russian sect of those who seek to use swords to strike down’ a dangerous and strong enemy. Back came a letter from Pyatakov, who did not mince his words:6

You, Vladimir Ilich, have grown accustomed to looking at everything on too large a scale, deciding all the big questions of strategy at a distance of a hundred kilometres whereas our need is to resolve the little tactical questions from three kilometres away, or, ten kilometres at the very most. And this is the reason, in my opinion, why you on this question are relapsing into schematism and – if I may pay you back in kind – genuine boastfulness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the same article Lenin made a striking apology:12

I am, it seems, immensely guilty before the workers of Russia for not intervening sufficiently energetically and sufficiently sharply in the notorious question of autonomisation, officially known, it seems, as the question of the union of soviet socialist republics.

Let us leave aside the fact that Lenin was saying only that it seemed he was guilty. Let us also overlook his reference to ‘Russia’ as if Georgia and other non-Russian countries were part of it. What is genuinely remarkable is the emotional tone. Lenin was baring his soul.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next day, after receiving a positive reply from Trotski about the Georgian affair, he asked Volodicheva to deliver the letter to Stalin. Then he dictated yet another letter. This one went to Mdivani and the Georgian communist group:18

Respected comrades,

With all my heart I am following your case. I am indignant at the uncouthness of Ordzhonikidze and the indulging of him by Stalin and Dzierżyński. I’ll prepare some notes and a speech for you.

With respect,

Lenin

Little did he know that his entourage, including his wife, decided that the letter to Stalin should not be handed over to its addressee. Already on 5 March Lenin’s physical condition had taken a turn for the worse, and it must be assumed that Nadezhda Konstantinovna was worried lest the dispute with Stalin should finish him off altogether. He had a bad night on 6–7 March, and again lost the use of the extremities of the right side of his body. In the morning, however, Maria Volodicheva decided that she could not disobey Lenin’s wishes for ever; she took the letter across the Kremlin to Stalin. Copies were given, as Lenin had demanded, to Kamenev and Zinoviev.

Stalin was stupefied: ‘This isn’t Lenin speaking, it’s his illness.’ With some poise and much Georgian pride he wrote back: ‘If my wife were to behave incorrectly and you had to punish her, I would not have considered it my right to intervene. But inasmuch as you insist, I’m willing to apologise to Nadezhda Konstantinovna.’19 Kamenev, however, persuaded him that Lenin would be more offended by such a concession than by the original offence. Stalin rewrote his letter, but not before he had a terrible quarrel over the telephone with Maria Ilinichna. Yet he was sufficiently worried to moderate the words of his response to Lenin.

Stalin need not have bothered. By that time Lenin was in no condition to read anything. He could not even speak. Nor could he move without being carried. Nadezhda Konstantinovna and Maria Ilinichna took turns at his bedside; the doctors watched with equal anxiety. On 10 March, Lenin suffered an immense spasm. His right side was completely paralysed and he could move his left hand only with the greatest difficulty. He could not sleep, and had awful headaches. Any hope he had of recovery had virtually vanished. Nadezhda Konstantinovna and Maria Ilinichna nursed him, and Nadezhda Konstantinovna had lessons in how to teach people to talk again after a stroke. His will to survive, apart from days when he would gladly have swallowed a cyanide pill if he could, was intact. But he accepted the need to take things gently and to move to the Big House at Gorki. It took two months before the doctors thought him strong enough to be transported. But a vehicle with special springs was got ready and on 15 May 1923 it carried him, under guard, out of the Kremlin to the countryside south of Moscow.

Stalin had been let off the hook. The Twelfth Party Congress, to which Lenin had hoped to present his political testament, passed with Stalin being able to give the Central Committee report on ‘the national question’. Mdivani and the Georgian communists were defeated. Lenin’s remarks about Stalin in the testament were read out to the heads of delegations, but were not discussed on the floor of the Congress. Trotski failed to rise to the occasion and Kamenev and Zinoviev, worried more that Trotski might make a bid for power than that Stalin might later turn on them, supported the General Secretary. Stalin survived without irreparable damage to his authority and status. He kept the General Secretaryship. Now he had to hope that Lenin would never return to his political career. For Stalin, the signs were propitious.

Meanwhile Lenin was almost totally incapacitated; and Professor Strumpel, summoned from Germany, reasserted that he was probably suffering from an advanced form of syphilis and that the careful application of arsenic and iodine preparations should be continued.20 Councils of doctors held in March, April and May, however, failed to produce a diagnostic consensus. No specialist could prove his point of view and several of them were in any case still baffled. The pitiful condition of the patient was obvious. British communists had bought and sent Lenin an electric wheelchair from J. A. Carter and Co. in central London. Its operational lever was positioned on the right-hand side, where Lenin had no bodily usage; in any case he refused to use the vehicle and insisted that it should be passed on to a Civil War veteran. He was dressed plainly in a khaki tunic and high-laced walking shoes. But the most he could do was sit with Nadezhda Konstantinovna and wait for her to work out what he was thinking; a few grunts and groans were all he could manage. But the usual thing was for him to say: ‘Here, here, here.’21 She was not always sure what he was trying to say; she had to make an informed guess and carry on the conversations regardless.

When it all became too much, Nadezhda Konstantinovna collapsed in tears. (Once Lenin had to give her a handkerchief.) Maria Ilinichna, a true Ulyanov, did not let her grief show. To the astonishment of Lenin’s bodyguard Pëtr Pakaln, not once did she sob.22 Yet both women experienced acute strain. After March 1923 Lenin asked first Maria and then Nadya for poison. Maria felt so coerced by him that she had to trick him by offering a phial of quinine. Nadya rejected the requests entirely, as did Lidia Fotieva.23 None of the women could predict how the situation would develop and they had ceased bothering to ask the doctors. It was obvious to both Nadya and Maria that Lenin’s condition baffled contemporary medical science. Maria felt bitter about this. If they knew so little for certain, she very reasonably concluded, they should not have experimented by allowing him back to work in October 1922.24 Nadya, for her part, had accepted his emotional need to stay somehow involved in political activity, but she too scorned the doctors as being next to useless and wrote to friends in Moscow saying that she doubted that there was any hope left for her husband.25

And yet there were days when he felt a lot better. For example, he discovered that one of the comrades convalescing at Gorki, in the adjacent building, was none other than the man with whom he had debated the merits of Marxism in 1889–90, Alexander Preobrazhenski. Those days at Alakaevka in Samara seemed like a different epoch. Lenin was overjoyed to meet and embrace his old friend, who was suffering from a cardiac ailment. Indeed he refused to leave Preobrazhenski’s quarters that night or the next.26 Slumping down on the bed, he exclaimed: ‘I’m done in!’ A distraught Maria Ilinichna trailed after him for fear that he might collapse.27

This was in July 1923. Another escapade took place in October, when Lenin suddenly took it into his head to make a trip to the Kremlin. Maria Ilinichna remonstrated with him: ‘Listen, Volodya, they won’t let you into the Kremlin: you haven’t got an entrance card.’ But he only laughed and muttered incomprehensibly.28 His chauffeur Gil brought the Rolls-Royce from the garage behind the Big House and, accompanied by Nadya and Maria, drove Lenin to the capital. As Maria had anticipated, they were not immediately granted entrance through the Kremlin gates. But again Lenin merely laughed. Back he went to his familiar rooms. To the apartment he had shared with Nadezhda Konstantinovna and Maria Ilinichna; to the Central Committee meeting room; and lastly to the Sovnarkom chamber. On the way he asked for particular books to be taken from the shelves, and checked that everything was as it should be in his absence. Just once, when he gazed around the Sovnarkom chamber with its long, green-baize table, did he become disconsolate.29 It was there that he had directed the government through the years of the Civil War and of the early New Economic Policy. The memories unblocked his emotions; for a moment it seemed that he could not continue with the visit. But he recovered. By the time his little tour was over, it was too late to return to Gorki, and Lenin, Nadya and Maria stayed overnight in their old apartment.

This was the last such jaunt Lenin took outside the Gorki estate. Winter had set in. The countryside was covered in snow, and in the bright, low sun of the early afternoon there was no more wonderful vista in Russia. Miles and miles of leafless birch trees stretched to the horizon. The two miles of dirt road from the rail-stop at the village of Gerasimovka were cleared and relaid so that the doctors could come and go. But generally the peasants, servants, patients and their relatives were isolated from the rest of the world. They might just as well have been living at Shushenskoe in Siberian exile. No agricultural work could be done on the collective farm and no building maintenance was possible on the Big House’s exterior. Time stood still.

Until mid-autumn Nadya had been able to wheel her husband around as they hunted for fungi. Lenin had loved to beat her in spotting them before her. Competitive as ever, he was pleased that he could do some things that others could not.30 But in the last weeks of the year they went out simply to enjoy the panorama across the flat fields. Riding in a horse-drawn sleigh, they were accompanied by Pëtr Pakaln, the medical assistant Vladimir Rukavishnikov or one of the male nurses.31 Some days Lenin was very buoyant, and Nadya wrote a postcard to the Armand children rejoicing that he could ‘walk around independently (with a stick)’.32 The doctors too were pleased with him. Indeed Pëtr Pakaln reported to the Cheka – and indirectly to Stalin in the Party Secretariat – that Lenin ‘felt magnificent’.33 As he had done in the previous winter, ‘Grandad Lenin’ gave orders for a fir tree to be placed in the Big House for a children’s party. Anna Ilinichna’s adopted son Gora Lozgachëv, now a strapping sixteen-year-old, was allowed by Maria Ilinichna to join in the fun with other invited children.34 Lenin also welcomed visits from political associates. Among those who came out for a chat with him were party leaders Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and Yevgeni Preobrazhenski.35

Yet there were many counter-indications about his condition: in November and December 1923 alone he suffered seven collapses.36 Quite what he thought about this is unknown. This was partly a technical problem of oral disability, but he had always kept his own counsel. Nadya, who had been drawn back towards him by his need for her to nurse him, resented this reticence and told Bukharin that it was as if a wall existed between them.37 But she kept on trying to break her way through to him.

In defiance of the Politburo, she talked to him about politics; but even she dared not agitate him by telling him about a dispute that had erupted in the central party leadership. In autumn 1923 Trotski had published a series of articles, The New Course, in which he criticised the party’s bureaucratic condition and the state’s weak and inefficient control over the economy. A Left Opposition gathered around Trotski. The rest of the Politburo fought back; Stalin, Kamenev, Zinoviev and Bukharin stood shoulder to shoulder and organised their followers in Moscow and the provinces to counteract Trotski’s campaign. The ascendant party leadership appealed for unity and loyalty and used every organisational trick in the book to vilify the Left Opposition. All this suited Stalin. Trotski had put himself in the role of the party splitter and could not call upon Lenin to help him out. The rest of the Politburo claimed that Trotski lusted after personal power and wished to wreck the New Economic Policy. At the Thirteenth Party Conference, held in Moscow in January 1924, the Left Opposition went down to a crushing defeat. By then Trotski was away from the field of combat; physical exhaustion had compelled him to take a lengthy rest in Sukhumi on the Abkhazian coast of the Black Sea.

Nadya knew that this was the very schism that Lenin had predicted in his ‘Letter to the Congress’. She fibbed in order to keep him calm. As she read him her selections from Pravda, she told him that the party had emerged united from the Thirteenth Party Conference. The deceit seemed to work. He ‘felt wonderful’ on 18 January 1924 and next day went out for a ride in the horse-drawn sleigh.38 Bukharin had come out to stay at Gorki for a few days’ rest and to do a bit of writing; he stayed in the building opposite the Big House. Maria Ilinichna bustled around as normal and Nadezhda Konstantinovna went on reading to Lenin. On 20 January there was reason to celebrate: it was a full month since Lenin had had a collapse.

On 21 January, too, there seemed no cause for concern. Lenin woke up at 10.30 a.m. and went to the bathroom. This was not particularly late for him during his convalescence. But then he announced that he was not feeling well and after drinking half a cup of black coffee he went back to his bed at 11.00 a.m. There he slept. At 3.00 p.m. he felt a little brighter and sipped another half-cup and a bowl of clear soup. Professor Osipov went to the bedroom to make his daily examination of the patient and found nothing especially worrisome. Lenin’s pulse was a trifle fast, but his temperature was normal. His speech was no worse than for some months. But then a crisis began without warning at 5.40 p.m. Lenin, propped up in bed, felt the tremor of an incipient attack. Nausea invaded his entire body. The doctors on duty – Osipov, Förster and Yelistratov – held a hurried consultation, attended by their assistant Vladimir Rukavishnikov. Also present were Nadezhda Konstantinovna and Maria Ilinichna.39 Lenin fell into a coma. He stayed in it much longer than in December 1923, when he had several times been unconscious for twenty minutes. His heartbeat slowed and Maria Ilinichna sent out for some camphor to restore it. This was an emergency.

Bukharin heard that something was happening and ran across to the Big House to investigate. The guards were in their customary positions around the building. But inside nothing was as normal. The lights were on upstairs and Pakaln, who usually patrolled the ground floor, was nowhere to be seen.40 Bukharin rushed upstairs. There he discovered Pakaln, who wanted to be with Nadezhda Konstantinovna and Maria Ilinichna as Lenin fought for his life. Lenin’s temperature had risen sharply. He tossed and turned in the narrow bed and was covered in sweat. He roared in pain. Bukharin was there for the end at 6.50 p.m.:41

When I ran into Ilich’s room, full of doctors and stacked with medicines, Ilich let out a last sigh. His face fell back and went terribly white. He let out a wheeze, his hands dropped. Ilich, Ilich was no more.

The doctors lifted his eyelids to test whether there was still a chance. But there could be only one diagnosis. Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov–Lenin, man of struggle, had breathed his last.

A telephone call was put through immediately to the Kremlin. The Politburo had made arrangements for such an outcome and all its members except Trotski met in Zinoviev’s Kremlin flat to confer. Kamenev rang Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich to instruct him to go out to Gorki to supervise the disposal of the body. On 22 January, Bonch-Bruevich went out by train to Gerasimovka with Lenin’s sister Anna and brother Dmitri. Next day the coffin was carried through a line of mourning villagers down to the railway station and transported to Moscow. The corpse was laid out in the House of Trade Unions. In the biting cold, mourners moved upon Moscow from the rest of the USSR. Obituaries filled the newspapers. Everyone was gripped by uncertainty as to what would happen next. The Cheka was put on alert in case anti-Bolshevik political groups should attempt something against the regime. A solemn session of the Congress of Soviets was held on 26 January, where speeches were made in commemoration of the late leader. Central Committee leaders took turns in swearing oaths to his ideas and example. ‘We swear to you, comrade Lenin,’ declared Stalin, ‘that we shall not spare our lives in strengthening the union of the working people of the entire world – the Communist International.’

The funeral took place on 27 January 1924, six days after Lenin’s death. It was the coldest day of the year. The trumpeters had to smear vodka on their instruments to stop their breath freezing on their lips. The crowd on Red Square sang the Internationale as the body of Lenin was brought up from the House of Trade Unions. Zinoviev, Kamenev, Stalin, Bukharin, Molotov, Tomski, Rudzutak and Dzierżyński held the coffin; Trotski was still in Sukhumi, having been ‘reassured’ by Stalin that he need not return. All business was halted in Moscow. Factory whistles and hooters were sounded. The same scene was repeated elsewhere in the cities, towns and villages of the USSR. Trains were stopped in their tracks. Boats were moored. A vault had been prepared in front of the Kremlin Wall on Red Square. Lenin was lowered into the earth at four o’clock in the afternoon. It was already dark and getting darker.

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