The Lessons of October

The history of the period between the World Wars of the last century is, it might be said, the history of reaction to the Bolshevik Revolution; that the victory of the Communists-which Lenin and Trotsky believed would be the spark for revolution across the Continent-was only the first stage in a new civil war, a new class war, if you prefer, in which the left saw defeat, after defeat, after defeat.

Not only did the Bolshevik victory cause a permanent division between the Communists and the moderate Socialists, but it was one of the most important factors in the shaping of Fascism and right-wing authoritarianism, first in Italy and then across the rest of Europe. Fear of Communism, in other words, was the greatest single force in galvanizing the right, from Horthy to Hitler.

So, you already have an international labour movement further divided and further weakened by the emergence of vigorous forms of right-wing reaction. To make matters even worse, a large section of the left looked to the Third International in Moscow for political direction, which most often results in a 'general line', regardless of local conditions. Looking beyond Europe, the United Front strategy of the 1920s obliged those loyal to Moscow to enter into alliances with so-called bourgeoisie liberation movements, which almost led to the ruin of the Chinese Communist Party in 1927, when it was purged by Chang Kai-shek.

Having learned nothing from this, the Comintern then adopted the ultra-left Third Period line, favoured by Stalin, which insisted that revolution was immanent, and that the real enemy was not the Fascist right but the moderate left, the so-called 'Social Fascists'. It was against this background that Hitler came to power in 1933, bringing the destruction of the KPD, the largest Communist party in Europe outside Russia.

Now, with the whole of the European left in disarray, and Stalin in a state of shock, the Comintern made yet another rapid change, this time in favour of Popular Fronts, intended to unite all on the left, Communists and Socialists, with moderate liberals, in a common effort against the further advance of Fascism. But the Popular Front in France only added to that country's deepening political divisions, while the Popular Front in Spain led to the outbreak of the Civil War and the victory of Francisco Franco, yet another serious defeat of the left.

So, what is the conclusion? Simply this: that the Bolshevik Revolution created the raison d'etre for Fascism and, by dividing the left, weakened the capacity of the working classes to resist its advance. It was a disaster in whichever way you care to look at it, in Russia and beyond

A Tale of Two Tyrannies

There were similarities between the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic inasmuch as they were both based on a rejection of the liberal tradition; both based on a single ideology and a monolithic ruling party; both on the same coercive forms of social control.

But the differences were far greater than the similarities. National Socialism was regressive and backwards, defined as a repressive cult of power, and no more than a cult of power. The GDR, even at its most oppressive, drew its logic and inspiration from transcendent notions of human liberation, which made its internal contradictions all the greater. It was forced constantly to dissimulate, prevaricate and explain; to justify itself by forms of ideology in every sense alien to that of National Socialism. The Nazi state, moreover, was based on an unstable combination of charisma and mass engagement. The GDR was based on boredom and bureaucratic torpor. One died of excess; the other died of senility.

The Greatest Failure since Lenin

It’s now twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wail, presaging collapse of Communism across Eastern Europe. I marked the occasion recently in a piece I called The Woes of Lemonade Joe, focusing specifically on the actions of Mikhail Gorbachev. I’m now beginning to find out even more about the man, about exactly what motivated him. And the thing that motivated him most was the writings of Lenin! I can’t quite believe that; he must have been the only man in the whole rotten system to pay anything bit lip service to that particular monster of Russian history. I’ll say more on this in a bit.

I’ve glanced over The Accidental Hero of 1989, a piece by Victor Sebestyen in the latest edition of Prospect. Some of the details are really quite amusing. The gradual sclerosis of the Soviet leadership in the days before Gorbachev became General Secretary was a source of much sardonic humour. How could it not when a living cadaver like Konstantin Chernenko was wheeled on to the stage? “Comrades,” one joke went, “we will start the congress in the traditional way-with the carrying in of the general secretary.”

Gorbachev, reaching the top of the barbed-wire pole in his fifties, came almost like a schoolboy compared with the gerontocracy that had ruled hitherto. Amazingly he was the first Soviet leader to have been born after the Revolution of 1917. His rise through the ranks of Party and government followed the usual pattern. “We all licked Brezhnev’s ass”, to use his own words. But Lemonade Joe was different: he was an idealist in a world of cynics and placemen-and that was the cause of his ruin and the ruin of the Evil Empire. It must be one of history’s acutest ironies: for what Lenin set up he also pulled down.

It was Gorbachev’s special mission, as he saw it, to return to the ‘pure’ path of Lenin away from the ‘perversions’ of Stalin. Leninist ideology was always there as a sort of background noise, some noticed but mostly tried to ignore, though not Gorby. His idealism is actually quite touching, naïve, yes, but touching. Unfortunately for him it most often ended in disaster. He somehow thought that by allowing the publication of Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, by revealing the horrors of Soviet history, that people would somehow become better Communists! The reality, of course, is that they began to hate the foul doctrine even more.

It really is true: Gorbachev’s path to hell was paved with not just good intentions but with truly noble ones. Consider more closely the actions, worthy in every degree, which earned him the nickname of Lemonade Joe. In 1984 more than nine million drunks were picked off Soviet streets. The statistics for premature death, family violence and crime were truly shocking. In the Politburo when Gorbachev proposed a drastic increase in the price of vodka, Vladimir Dementsev, the finance minister, objected that it would have disastrous effect on state finances. “Do you propose to build communism on vodka?”, Gorbachev responded. He simply did not understand that the system had long since abandoned all attempts to ‘build communism.’

The price hike had just the effect Dementsev predicted. What was worse the growth in illegal distilleries and home brewing resulted often in a form of mass poisoning. The death rate shot up even further. Gorbachev took two steps forward and three steps back. And that is more or less how the Soviet Empire was governed in its final years.

He receives hardly any mention now in Russian school texts, which devote much space to the greatness of Stalin. That’s not fair. Gorbachev was by far the greatest Leninist since Lenin; and that is precisely why he was Communism’s greatest failure.

Of Terror and Revolution

There is an interesting parallel between Stalin’s Great Terror and Mao’s Cultural Revolution, seemingly so different, but aimed at the same purpose; namely of elimination of all obstacles on the path of supreme power.

In the Terror the whole tone was set by the trial of Georgy Pyatakov, the former supporter of Trotsky and member of the Left Opposition, and the leading representative of what might be referred to as new forms of Soviet managerialism. It was this class, represented at all levels of the state apparatus, from local Soviets up to the Central Committee, that was the object of Stalin's 'Cultural Revolution', as he, Vyacheslav Molotov and Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD, hinted in speeches from February 1937 onwards. The theme was consistent: there were 'wreckers', unnamed and unspecified, who were to be found everywhere, in every branch of the economy and society, overlooked by complacent Communists. Most worrying of all, for the majority, compliant and conformist, was the suggestion that not all wreckers were to be found among the ranks of the former Opposition.

Once on his feet Moloch began to feed, and to feed on the apparatus of the state itself; where 'enemies of the people' were discovered at all levels, and in all areas. The whole thing was quite subtle, in that the press campaign was essentially directed against a privileged elite, long a source of resentment among ordinary people, but one beyond criticism. Now they knew who the 'bullies' were, the people who had made their lives intolerable; now they could hate and be free in their expressions of hatred; against the old bosses, whose power had supported a lifestyle of dachas, banquets, cars, expensive clothes and luxury goods.

There was no need for a Chinese-style Red Guard; the people themselves channelled all the hatred that was necessary against targets that were acceptable. The whole atmosphere of the times, known generally as 'the year 1937', even when it gave way to 1938, was anti-elitist, anti-specialist, anti-managerial, the very same things that were later to be features of Mao's Cultural Revolution. In October of the year '37 Stalin proposed a toast to the 'little people'; for "Leaders come and go, but the people remain. Only the people are eternal." But the people were only there as stage extras, to serve a greater purpose; and the purpose was Stalin's; and the purpose was Mao's. Political power comes not from the barrel of a gun; it comes from fear; it comes from hate

Lenin and Gorky-the Odd Couple

Lenin and Maxim Gorky had a long acquaintance, and shared some general ides, but their individual visions were quite different. Gorky's idea of revolution was much more bound up in notions of brotherhood and freedom, which had very little in common with Lenin's political dialectics, or with his notions of party discipline. Gorky admired Lenin's intellect but hated the way in which he constrained the complexity of life into a narrow set of abstract theories.

The two men first clashed over politics, and the future course of the revolution, in 1909 and 1910, specifically on the question of workers' education. For Lenin the workers had no value as an independent cultural force, but only as disciplined cadres of the party. But Gorky, along with Alexander Bogdanov and Anatoly Lunacharsky, saw Marxism as a form of religion, to be expressed in new forms of comradeship and union, a theme he takes up in Confession, his novel of 1908. It's hardly any great surprise, then, that Gorky did not settle down comfortably with the form the Revolution took in Russia after November 1917.

In Novaya Zhizn-New Life-, the independent socialist newspaper he published in Petrograd in 1917 and 1918, Gorky time and again challenged the brutishness he saw around him in his Untimely Thoughts column, describing it as an outburst of 'zoological instincts', of ancient hatreds given life by the brutality of the war and the rhetoric of the Bolsheviks. The crushing of the Kronstadt Rebellion and the Red Terror further underlined that the Bolsheviks would not be diverted from the most oppressive forms of dictatorship. But what he found most intolerable was the government's indifference to the famine brought on by the forced grain requisitions of War Communism. He finally decided to go into exile, an action that Lenin had been urging upon him for some time.

The ambivalent relationship he had with Lenin-one of love and one of hate-was fully evident after the latter's death in 1924. It left Gorky with feelings of guilt and regret; with a painful sense that there were issues between the two which could now never be resolved. Soon after he wrote to Romain Rolland, saying "Lenin's death has been a very heavy blow for me. I loved him. I loved him with wrath." It was to cause him to reassess his whole attitude towards the Bolshevik Revolution and all that followed; that Lenin had been right and he had been wrong. It was the beginning of a new path of self-deception.

Political Fraud; the Story of the People's Convention

The so-called People's Convention was set up after the outbreak of the Second World War, supposedly on the initiative of the Hammersmith Trade. In reality the initiative came from the Kremiln during the time of the Nazi-Soviet pact, the honeymoon of the odd couple. Loyal Communists were instructed to denounce the struggle with Germany as an 'imperialist war', hence the need for bogus front organisations like the People's Convention.

It was all quite subtle, of course, in the usual Communist style. People were encouraged to join in support of initiatives like higher living standards or better bomb shelters. Once safely enrolled they discovered that the 'real enemy' was not Germany but Winston Churchill and those members of the Labour party who joined the wartime coalition. The best denunciation of the whole fraud came from George Orwell, Harold Laski and Victor Gollancz, who in 1940, under the auspices of the Left Book Club, publised Betrayal of the Left. In this Gollancz asked,

Can anyone carry self-delusion to the point of being able to read through the file of the Daily Worker [The Communist Party Newspaper] and still believe that this motive was any other than to weaken the will to resist? When, at the same time, you tell people that this is an unjust war, fought for no purpose but to increase the profits of the rich: when you jeer at any comment about the morale and heroism of the public and call it 'sunshine talk'; what possible purpose can you have but to stir up hatred of the government and hatred of the war, with the object of underminining the country's determination to stand up to Hitler?

The Convention, shameful as it was, attracted the support of some prominent intellectuals, including Raymond Williams and Eric Hobsbawm, who wrote a pamphlet defending the Soviet aggression against Finland, because Stalin was only seeking to defend Russia against an attack by 'British imperialists'!

You will find more information on the Convention in "All the Russians Love the Prussians", Chapter Eight of Nick Cohen's What's Left, an excellent expose of the moral cowardice of so much left-wing thought.

Tito the Dictator

The late Marshal Tito presided over a dictatorship just as brutal as any of the other Communist regimes of the day. If fact, if you examine that period of Yugoslav history just after Tito's split with the rest of the Soviet Bloc, then it is really difficult to conclude that what was at work was anything other than Stalinism without Stalin.

In 1949 the Communist leadership began the forced collectivisation of agriculture. Those who resisted were branded as 'kulaks', in echo of the mass Soviet collectivisation from 1928 onwards. Just as in Russia, agricultural production levels fell as a consequence of the huge disruption entailed, and the general decline in peasant productivity. The most significant resistance came in Bosnia in May 1950, where some Serbs and Croats joined in an uprising initiated by the Muslim farmers. Several hundred peasants were killed before the rising was suppressed.

The split with the Soviets also entailed a huge increase in the state security apparatus, which put the membership of the Yugoslav Communist Party under scrutiny, as well as the general population. In all some 16,000 alleged Soviet sympathisers were arrested, many of whom ended up in the concentration camp on Goli otok and elsewhere. Tito's terror was later brilliantly depicted in Emir Kusturica's damming film of 1987, Otac na službenom putu (Father's Away on a Business Trip). The dreadful conditions suffered by the prisoners even shocked Milovan Djilas, then a government minister, in a visit he made to Goli otok in 1951.

As the state of siege became less intense after the death of Stalin conditions began to improve somewhat throughout both the economy and society in general, with a move away from collectivisation and a new stress on workers self-management, which, in the end, served to distinguish Titoism from the forms of state-centralism practiced among the Comecon countries. To some extent this was an inevitable consequence of the forms of western aid upon which Tito became more reliant after 1948. But as the puppet-master and dictator, Tito was no less vigilant, and no less brutal, than any other in the Communist Bloc.

Lenin's Century

I saw this man, yes, I did, or at least what purports to be him in the mausoleum in Red Square, though he looked more like something from Madame Tussaud rather than the remains of a real person, grotesquely preserved as a modern form of an Egyptian mummy. It was December 2005, Christmas Day of all days, and I was in Moscow for a few days with my boyfriend. I’m not sure that I really wanted to see this spectacle-my boyfriend was keener-but no trip to Moscow would be complete without it, I suppose. It made me feel a bit like a Medieval pilgrim off to see the head or hands or other earthly remains of some long-dead Saint. And I suppose that was the point of the whole thing, to induce a bogus sense of secular reverence; it was certainly Stalin’s point, the point of a one-time student in an Orthodox seminary. Ecce Hommo- a dead man and frozen ideas.

Before proceeding any further I will make a free confession: I despise Lenin: I despise his memory, I despise everything he stood for; I despise his murderous intolerance, I despise his writing and his whole thought-process. Above all, I despise him as the chief architect of the murder of the Romanovs, of the Tsar and the Tsaritsa; of the children; of Alexi, Olga, Maria, Tatiana and Anastasia. So, you are at liberty to dismiss all that follows as pure prejudice on my part.

So, yes, I despise him, but I cannot dismiss his historical significance: he was, in a sense, the creator of the twentieth century, thankfully drawing ever further into the past. The Bolshevik Coup of November 1917 ended any prospect of a continuing democratic revolution in Russia; it may have ended the prospects for democracy for all time in that country, at least as we understand it in the west. And the Coup was Lenin’s Coup; of that there can be no mistake. He was also the creator of Stalin, his most gifted acolyte. And as for his later ‘rejection’ of his ‘wonderful Georgian’ of all the things it was possible to say about Stalin to accuse him of rudeness most count as the most laughable political critique of all time!

And so the apostolic succession continued: Lenin begat Stalin, Stalin begat Mao, and Mao begat Pol Pot, a descent into ever decreasing and ever more homicidal circles. But there is more than that, far more. The right-wing reaction that swept across Europe in the 1920s and 1930s was occasioned both by a fear of Communism and a determination to learn from Communist practices. So Fascism and Nazism are, in a sense, the bastard children of Lenin and Leninism, just as Mussolini and Hitler are his illegitimate sons. Leninism, in its practical impact, was the first attempt in history at democide, arguably its most lasting, its only legacy.

There were not many people visiting on that Christmas Day. Gone are the long tails of yesterday. Gone, too, is Communism, killed off towards the end of Lenin’s Century. There are states that are still ruled by a Communist oligarchy, states like China and Vietnam, but the ideology is all but dead. There is, of course, the sclerotic Castroist regime in Cuba, tottering, like its creator, on the lips of death. And there is the termite society of North Korea, with a government that builds bombs while the people starve. It might serve as a kind of museum piece, a reminder of everything Lenin brought to the world.

What of the man, or the-alleged-remains of the man? There was a proposal not long after the collapse of the Soviet Union that he should at last be allowed a proper burial. I remember reading what one ordinary Russian said about this, that the soil of Holy Russia would not receive him, that he deserved to remain as he was, to be gawped at by the idle and the curious; to be gawped at by me. Amen to that!

The Murder of the Romanovs

The decision to murder the Russian royal family reveals much about the inner workings of the Bolshevik Party at the time. The official story given out was that the task had been delegated to the Ural Soviet, though the murder of the Tsaritsa Alexandra and the five children was kept secret for over a year after the event.

It is still not been proved conclusively just how the decision to kill the family was arrived at; if it was central, or if it was local; and, if central, who exactly was involved. However, I can offer you a reasonable amount of circumstantial evidence that points quite firmly at Moscow.

For the Ural Soviet the presence of the royal family at Yekaterinburg was a growing concern, especially as the Czech Legion and other White forces approaching the town from the east. Rather than risk moving them they decided on execution, though they were unwilling to act without the approval the Council of Commissars in Moscow. Ivan Goloschekin, a member of the Ural Soviet who also happened to be a friend of Yakov Sverdlov, a close political associate of Lenin, was sent to Moscow to take soundings on the matter. He was told by Sverdlov that the government was still considering putting Nicholas on trial, an idea favoured by Trotsky. However, the steady advance of the Whites towards Yekaterinburg changed this, and Goloschekin was able to return with the news that Moscow had delegated the whole business to the Ural Soviet.

With Lenin's permission Sverdlov formally announced the death of Nicholas at a meeting of the Executive Council on 18 July 1918. Nothing was said of the fate of the Empress Alexandra and the five children, though an official statement was issued that they had all been moved. However, both Lenin and Sverdlov knew that they were all dead. They had been so advised by telegram from Yekaterinburg. The statement was a lie.

A year passed before the government admitted that they had all been shot, though the Social Revolutionaries were blamed. However, the real link between Moscow and the Urals was later made clear in a conversation between Sverdlov and Trotsky. Trotsky reports this in his memoirs thus;

"My next visit to Moscow took place after the fall of Yekaterinburg. Talking to Sverdlov, I asked in passing: 'Oh, yes, and where is the Tsar?
'It's all over,' he answered. 'He has been shot.'
'And where is the family?'
'And the family along with him.'
'All of them?', I asked, apparently with a touch of surprise.
'All of them,' replied Sverdlov. 'What about it?' He was waiting to see my reaction, I made no reply.
'And who made the decision?', I asked.
'We decided it here. Ilych [Lenin] believed that we shouldn't leave the Whites a live banner to rally round, especially under the present difficult circumstances.'
I did not ask any further questions and considered the matter closed. Actually, the decision was not only expedient but necessary. The severity of the summary justice showed the world that we would continue to fight mercilessly, stopping at nothing. The execution of the Tsar's family was needed not only in order to frighten, horrify, and dishearten the enemy, but also in order to shake up our own ranks to show that there was no turning back, that ahead lay only complete victory or complete ruin...This Lenin sensed well."

Sverdlov was certainly implicated in the murder of the entire family. It is difficult to accept that he would not have cleared this with Lenin, who, in my estimation, is guilty by association. He certainly deserves part of the 'credit' for this atrocity.

Since I wrote this I now have sufficient leads to conclude that there was something else at work, an indication that the Tsar and his family were early victims of the forms of struggle that were to become commonplace among the Bolsheviks in years to come. Although approved by the Central Committee the projected trial of the Tsar was very much Trotsky's favoured project, one where he would have appeared as prosecutor-in-chief. It would have added greatly to his prestige, and Sverdlov knew this. You see, the ideological struggles of the pre-Revolution days were about to give way to struggles over power. Sverdlov understood this in the way that Trotsky did not; and it was Sverdlov-in collaboration with the Ural Soviet-who did his best to undermine the projected trial.

Take a look again at the exchange reported by Trotsky in his Memoirs-it shows his surprise and Sverdlov's gleeful defiance. It's almost as if he is inviting Trotsky to object, which clearly he could not do. He had been outmaneuvered, decisively so, and his subsequent gloss was little more than a feeble attempt to make the best of the situation. In this, Sverdlov, the administrator, represented the Party, the old Bolshevik core, against the mercurial Trotsky, the former Menshevik. Sverdlov died in 1919, but the challenge to Trotsky was soon to be taken up by an even more formidable opponent.

Mao and Degeneration

It was Mao's belief that there was a specifically Chinese road to socialism, though in pursuit of that road he effectively turned the classic doctrines of Marxist materialism inside out, with quite disastrous consequences for China and the Chinese people.

You see, in terms of economic development and industrial resources, China of the mid-twentieth century was about as far removed from that stage of advanced historical development that Karl Marx had believed to be the essential precursor of a successful revolution. Short of many natural resources it possessed one thing in abundance-people. And it was people who were to be the raw material in Mao's great experiment.

Now, though Lenin had always stressed that there was a subjective element to the whole revolutionary process, that it was an act of political consciousness, Mao took this subjectivity to what might be described as an anti-materialist extreme. Distrustful of experts and obstacles, distrustful of bureaucracy, he placed his greatest intellectual emphasis on achieving goals by an 'act of faith' alone; that even the most difficult things were not beyond the power of will. In other words, it was the will of the people, the power of the masses, that would enable the Chinese to catch up with the Soviets and the advanced industrial powers of the west.

This, in essence, is the key to the Great Leap Forward. By this Mao hoped that steel production would increase if the energy and will of the whole nation could simply be directed towards that particular end, regardless of technical and practical objections. Revolutionary zeal would be enough. Of course it was not. The steel that was produced was of poor quality and the neglect of other areas of the economy, agriculture in particular, was to create one of the worst man-made famines in the whole course of Chinese history. Despite this Mao did not abandon his belief in revolutionary spontaneity, which was to emerge once again, with equally disastrous consequences, in the Cultural Revolution.

In thinking of the deleterious effects of these forms of anti-materialist and, it might be said, anti-Marxist voluntarism, one should also consider the actions of Pol Pot, Mao's greatest and most murderous disciple. I have been to the Killing Fields; I have seen.

Mao still haunts modern China, a little like the ghost of Banquo, although less relevant, less frightful, even, with the passing of the years.