Department of Agitation and Propaganda American Relief Administration Chinese Communist party

All-Russia Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle Ag

Counterrevolution and Sabotage Central Intelligence Agency Communist Party of the Soviet Union Far Northern Construction Project Federal Republic of Germany German Democratic Republic Main Literature and Art Administration State Commission for the Electrification of Russia State Publishing House State Political Administration Main Frontier Troops Administration Main Highway Construction Administration intercontinental ballistic missile Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History Caucasus Bureau State Security Committee Young Communist League

Agitprop ARA CCP Cheka

CIA CPSU

Dalstroi FRG GDR Glavlit GOELRO Gosizdat GPU GUPV Gushossdor ICBM IFU Kavburo KGB Komsomol Komuch KONR KPD LEF MGB

Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia German Communist party Left Front of Art Ministry of State Security

mutiple independently targeted reentry vehicle

medium-range ballistic missile

Military Revolutionary Committee

machine and tractor station

Ministry of Internal Affairs

North Atlantic Treaty Organization

Novocherkassk Electric Locomotive Plant

New Economic Policy

People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs

National-Labor Alliance of Russian Solidarists

Unified State Political Administration

Organizational Bureau

United Revolutionary Organization

Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists

Petrograd Military Organization

Provisional Polish Revolutionary Committee

Red Trade Union International

Proletarian Cultural and Educational Organization

Polish United Workers party

Russian Association of Proletarian Writers

Russian Liberation Army

Russian National Liberation Army

Russian Union of All Military Men

Russian Social Democratic Labor party

Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic

military counterintelligence

Free Interprofessional Association of Workers

Council of People's Commissars

Socialist Revolutionary

Department of Records and Assignments

Ukrainian Insurgent Army

Supreme Economic Council

All-Russia Executive Committee of the Railroad Workers' Union

All-Russia Social Christian Union for the Liberation of the

MIRV MRBM MRC MTS MVD NATO NELP NEP NKVD NTS OGPU Orgburo ORI OUN PMO Polrevkom Pro/intern Proletcult

PUWP RAPP ROA RONA ROWS RSDLP RSFSR SMERSH SMOT Sovnarkom

SR

Uchraspred UPA VSNKH VIKZHEL

VSKhSON

Zakburo

People Transcaucasian Bureau

CHAPTER

—i

BEFORE OCTOBER 1917

WORLD WAR I

The October revolution was a direct consequence of World War I. The decade preceding the war had been one of rapid economic growth. Industrial progress, in general, had begun in Russia in the 1860s after the emanci­pation of the serfs, but it intensified especially after Japan defeated Russia in 1905. Forced to rebuild its shattered navy and reequip its land forces, the tsarist government allocated large sums for military purposes, from which the industrial sector benefited the most.

Six months before the war started, the French economist Edmond ТЬёгу published a book entitled The Economic Transformation of Russia, in which he presented some rather eloquent figures. In the five-year period 1908- 1912, coal production increased by 79.3 percent over the preceding five years; iron by 24.8 percent; steel and metal products by 45.9 percent.¹ From 1900 to 1913 the output of heavy industry increased by 74.1 percent, even allowing for inflation.² The rail network, which covered 24,400 ki­lometers in 1890, had grown to 61,000 kilometers by 1915.³ Industrial progress helped to reduce Russia's dependence on foreign capital. Although The History of the USSR, a textbook for students of history at Soviet uni­versities and teachers colleges, states that in 1914 the "specific weight" of foreign capital in the Russian economy was 47 percent,⁴ another Soviet source, the historian L. M. Spirin, estimates that foreign investments amounted to only about "one-third of total investments."⁵ The English writer Norman Stone notes that on the eve of World War I foreign investment in Russia had declined by 50 percent in the period 1904^1905, and amounted to 12.5 percent in 1913.⁶

Edmond ТЬёгу emphasized that Russian agriculture had made as much progress as industry. From 1908 to 1912 wheat production rose by 37.5 percent over the preceding five years; rye by 2.4 percent; barley by 62.2 percent; oats by 20.9 percent; and corn by 44.8 percent. ТЬёгу commented: "This increase in agricultural production served not only to meet the new needs of the population. ... It also allowed Russia to expand its foreign markets significantly and, thanks to its earnings from grain exports, to end its unfavorable balance of trade." In good harvest years, such as 1909 and 1910, Russian wheat exports amounted to 40 percent of world wheat ex­ports. Even in bad years, such as 1908 and 1912, they still accounted for 11.5 percent.⁷

The population of the Russian empire, which in 1900 was 135 million, reached 171 million in 1912. ТЬёгу, basing himself on the demographic statistics of the beginning of the century, predicted a population of 343.9 million by 1948.® The figure cited by Soviet historians for the Russian empire in 1917, based on 1914 borders, is 179,041,100.⁹

The nation's economic progress was accompanied by fundamental social change. In the last fifty years of the empire, the urban population grew from 7 million to 20 million. The hierarchical structure of the state began to crumble. Social barriers fell. The importance of the nobility, the autoc­racy's traditional base of support, declined. "The class that provided lead­ership has ceased to fulfill its function; it is obsolete," wrote Vasily Shulgin, a prominent conservative politician (a monarchist) and subsequently one of the most talented chroniclers of the revolution.¹⁰

Major improvements were initiated in public education. In 1908 a law introducing compulsory primary education was adopted (although its im­plementation was interrupted by the revolution and delayed until 1930). The increased government spending for education serves as an index of the efforts being made: between 1902 and 1912 such spending rose by 216.2 percent.¹¹ By 1915, 51 percent of all children between eight and eleven years of age were in school, and 68 percent of all military conscripts knew how to read and write.¹² Certainly Russia still lagged behind the advanced Western countries, but the increased number of schools and greater funding testify to the government's commitment and the considerable success achieved in this area. The first two decades of the twentieth century also saw a remarkable flowering of Russian culture, which is often referred to as Russia's Silver Age.

The governmental system evolved at a much slower pace than the eco­nomic, social, and cultural structures. The 1905 revolution, which grew out of the disastrous war with Japan, compelled Tsar Nicholas II to accept a series of reforms and introduce a constitution. Russia became a consti­tutional monarchy with an elected assembly, the Duma. Freedom of the press, assembly, and association were guaranteed. These rights, and the powers of the Duma, were more limited than in the Western democracies, but they existed nevertheless. In the Duma, highly diverse political trends were represented—from the Bolsheviks on the left to supporters of absolute monarchy on the right. However, the Duma was based on indirect repre­sentation (a system of elections passing through several stages) and a limited franchise (allowing only those with certain qualifications to vote).

In 1906 Prime Minister Stolypin introduced a law allowing every head of a peasant family to become the owner of his share of the village's communal land. Trotsky explained clearly and concisely the potential im­portance of this reform, which was not fully implemented. "If the agrarian problem ... had been solved by the bourgeoisie, if it could have been solved by them, the Russian proletariat could not possibly have come to power in 1917."¹³

During the brief period between the 1905 revolution and World War I, Russia underwent a political evolution unprecedented in its history. Never­theless, discontent spread to all strata of the population. Despite major improvements in their condition, the peasants continued to feel intense land hunger and firmly believed that the only solution to their problems was to divide up the large landed estates. Workers' conditions were slowly improving. They had obtained, albeit with certain restrictions, the right to strike over economic issues and, after 1912, both health and accident insurance. Still they demanded a shorter workday and a better standard of living. The young bourgeoisie, seeking a place in the country's political system, demanded an extension of political rights. The intelligentsia dreamed of a revolution that would bring "freedom," and from its ranks came the nuclei of the numerous political parties. Also opposed to the central gov­ernment were all the heterogeneous peoples included in the Russian empire, the bitterest discontent being found among the Poles, the Finns, and the Jews.

Russia on the eve of World War I served as confirmation of a rule deduced by Alexis de Tocqueville from an analysis of the causes of the French revolution: for a bad government, the most dangerous time is when it begins to reform itself.

The case of Mendel Beilis, a Jew accused of the ritual murder of a Christian child, summed up the situation in a nutshell. Despite the openly expressed desire of the tsarist government and the judges for a conviction, the jury of half-literate Ukrainian peasants acquitted Beilis. The verdict in his favor was a remarkable expression of the weakness of progovernment forces.

Thus, Russia became involved in the world war at a time of rapid economic development, in an era of demolition and new construction, under conditions of universal discontent and rising expectations, with a weak government incapable of winning popular support. On several occasions the dangers posed by an entrance into the European conflict were pointed out. In February 1914, for example, Petr Durnovo, minister of the interior under the Witte government of 1905-06 and subsequently a member of the tsar's Council of State, sent Nicholas II a memorandum that included these prophetic words:

A war involving all of Europe would be a mortal danger for Russia and Germany, regardless of which was the victor. ... In the event of defeat, a possibility which cannot be excluded when faced with an enemy such as Germany, social revolution in its most extreme form would be inevitable in our country.

The memorandum was found among the tsar's papers after the revolution, unmarked by any royal notations. It is possible that the tsar did not bother to read it.¹⁴ Even Grigory Rasputin, that evil genius in the bosom of the royal family, whose influence on the destiny of the nation grew steadily after 1906, warned against the dangers of a war.

To this day historians disagree over who was responsible for and what were the actual causes of World War I. It is often forgotten that in the summer of 1914 one sentiment dominated in Europe: that war among civilized nations was impossible.

Europe entered the war after forty-five years of peace, if we count only wars between "white men," the last such being the Franco—Prussian war of 1871. War seemed inconceivable. Nevertheless it broke out. All the participants had prepared for it, yet they were all taken by surprise. For Russia the war became a test of the solidity of the various components of its colossal governmental, economic, and social organism.

The first battle lost by the Russian army, in East Prussia in August 1914, revealed the government's true condition and gave a glimpse of the factors that would bring the regime's downfall in the spring of 1917. Most historians, be they Russian or Soviet, attribute this defeat to the Russian army's unprepared, hence premature offensive, undertaken with the aim of saving France.

As early as August 1911 General Zhilinsky, then head of the Russian

General Staff, promised the French allies he would send an army of 800,000 men against Germany "on the fifteenth day of mobilization."¹⁵ When war was declared the French army launched an immediate offensive, but suf­fered very heavy casualties. Count Ignatiev, the Russian military аиасЬё in Paris, reported that losses were as high as 50 percent in some French regiments. He added: "It is now clear that the outcome of the war will depend on what we can do to divert the German forces toward outselves."¹⁶ The defeat of France would undoubtedly have meant the defeat of Russia as well. The Russian army was inadequately equipped for this crucial offensive, but that did not become apparent until too late.

The causes of the Russian defeat in East Prussia had to do above all with poor generalship, especially on the level of the General Staff and Field Headquarters (the Stavka). The hopes firmly held by all the belligerents, that the war would not last more than five or six weeks, of course proved false. The embattled nations were obliged to readjust, technically and psychologically, to the reality of prolonged positional warfare.

From the very first the Russian army suffered from a shortage of artillery shells, bullets, and rifles; like the other countries, they had believed the war would not last long. A "master plan" for the development of the Russian arms industry stated clearly that the political and economic situation ex­cluded the possibility of a prolonged war.¹⁷

In 1915, terribly shaken by its enormous losses on the battlefield, Russia was forced to withdraw from Poland—due in part to the shortage of am­munitions. Thus, a technical problem, munitions supply, became a central issue of state policy. The need to reorganize the economy to meet the demands of the war gave rise to a multitude of economic and political questions touching on the very essence of the tsarist system.

The shortage of shells was neither the sole nor the principal reason for Russia's difficulties, for in 1916, despite an abundance of munitions, amply provided by a reconverted industry, the Russian army was able to achieve success only once—in General Brusilov's offensive against the Austrians in Galicia. The shell "shortage" had been merely a symptom of a serious affliction in the tsarist state organism.

No sooner had the outburst of patriotic enthusiasm faded after the first few weeks of war than a crisis of authority began to develop in the army. By July 1915, 9 million men had been drafted. The number of officers, insufficient even for a peacetime army of 2 million, was sharply reduced by the loss of some 60,000 during the first year of war. This meant that hardly any of the 40,000 officers from before the war remained. The military academies graduated no more than 35,000 officers each year. By September 1915 it was a rare thing to find a front-line regiment (usually numbering 3,000 soldiers) with more than a dozen officers. Not until late 1915 and early 1916 did the practice of promoting the most outstanding rank-and- file soldiers begin on a large scale. The lack of noncommissioned officers was felt even more acutely.

The crisis of authority in the army was the most striking symptom of the general crisis of authority in the country. Shulgin, an important figure in the Duma, expressed his complaints to the tsar: "Goremykin [the prime minister], a senile fool, is in fact incapable of being the head of the government in the midst of a world war. ... He is organically incapable, because of his age and his hidebound rigidity, of coping with the demands imposed by the war."¹⁸ In January 1916 Nicholas replaced Goremykin with Sturmer. Shulgin had this to say about the new prime minister: 'The problem is that Sturmer is a small man, a nonentity, while Russia is involved in a world war. The problem is that all the great powers have mobilized their best forces, while in our case, we have a Santa Claus for a prime minister. ... That is why the country is in an uproar."¹⁹

The country was in an uproar because the Russian armies were being beaten. Prices were rising. Food supply to the cities was breaking down, although there was plenty of grain in the countryside. Russia was in an uproar because it was sick of the war. All segments of the population were beginning to see the source of their misfortunes in the tsar, the tsarina, and Rasputin.

The books that have been written about Grigory Rasputin and his in­explicable influence over the empress and, through her, Nicholas II would form an entire library. The correspondence of the imperial couple has provided abundant material for the most diverse interpretations, hy­potheses, and speculations: the empress's mysticism; the miraculous powers of "the monk" Rasputin, who on three occasions saved the hemophiliac prince from bleeding to death; hypnosis; even witchcraft. All that is beside the point. As Shulgin wrote: "Who does not know the sentence [attributed to the tsar]: 'Better Rasputin than ten hysterics a day.'" The historian rightly added: "I do not know whether this sentence was actually spoken, but it matters little since all of Russia repeated it."²⁰

The myth of Rasputin, the illiterate Siberian muzhik reputed to have cast a spell over the imperial family and to be shamelessly officiating in Petrograd, spread all over Russia despite the lack of modern means of communication. The myth wielded a death blow to the emperor's prestige.

The breach between society and its ruler became final in August 1915, when Nicholas assumed personal command of the army, thus shouldering direct responsibility for all of the country's defeats and disasters. His presence at Field Headquarters in Mogilev removed him from the capital.

One consequence of this became evident in February 1917, when the tsar, as if caught in a trap, was unable even to reach Petrograd. Meanwhile the influence of the tsarina and thus of Rasputin over the political life of the country grew apace.

The country lived its own life and the government lived its—in a vacuum. Despite the war—one might say because of it—rapid industrial growth continued. In 1914 the index of economic growth, taking 1913 as 100, rose to 101.2, in 1915 to 113.7, and in 1916 to 121.5.²¹ The extraction of iron ore increased in the same period by 30 percent, and petroleum production by an equal amount. There was major expansion in both the chemical industry and the machine industry. The drastic reduction of im­ports forced the industrialists to start producing machinery domestically. According to statistics from January 1, 1917, Russian factories in August 1916 were turning out more munitions than the French and twice as much as the British. In 1916 Russia made 20,000 light cannon and imported 5,625. It was 100 percent self-sufficient in the production of howitzers and 75 percent in heavy artillery.²² Subsequently, the reserves of armaments in imperial Russia proved large enough to last through more than three years of civil war.

In order to harness the turbulent and unplanned process of industrial growth and to eliminate the bottlenecks that developed along the way, some structural transformations, some reforms, were needed. But Nicholas II had only one desire: to keep the country as he had found it upon his ascension to the throne after his father's death. All of the tsar's actions, and all of his inaction, were directed to this end. Shulgin has suggested an eloquent postmortem for the Russia of that time: "An autocracy without an autocrat."²³

To the tsar's personal inaction was juxtaposed a tumultuous political area. "In 1917 there were political parties for nearly every social class," the Soviet historian Spirin notes—with some perplexity.²⁴ It should be added that these parties had originated well before 1917 and that most of them functioned legally, with their own representatives in the Duma. The Bol­shevik representatives, who openly called for Russia's military defeat, were not arrested until November 1914, and then exiled only after a trial.

By mid-1915 virtually all the parties in the Duma had gone into oppo­sition. The Progressive Bloc, the core of the parliamentary opposition, was formed in August 1915. It included the Constitutional Democrats (Cadets), the Union of October 17 (Octobrists), the Progressives, and the Nationalists. The binding force in this coalition of liberals, centrists, and rightists (except for the extreme right) was the sole liberal party in Russian history: the Cadets. The Cadet program stressed that it was a party of all the people, not of one class, and that its highest loyalty was to Russia and a strong Russian state. The Cadets explained their role in opposition to the tsar by their desire to strengthen the state. To a large degree they defined progress as Russia's ability to defend its international position.

The Cadets proclaimed that "everyone without exception" should be subject to the rule of law and that "fundamental civil rights" should be guaranteed to all citizens. They called for the eight-hour day, trade union rights, and mandatory medical and old age insurance paid for by the state. They advocated distribution of crown lands and monastery lands to the peasantry and expropriation of the large landed estates with indemnifica­tion. Categorically opposed to federalism or any change in the political structure that might weaken the empire, they saw as their main task to prepare Russia for "a parliamentary system and the rule of law."²⁵

The Cadet party's principal base was among those connected with the zemstvos, the institutions of local government introduced in the reforms of the 1860s. At the beginning of the war two empire-wide organizations, the Union of Zemstvos and the Union of Towns, were founded with the aim of involving the general public in the war effort, in cooperation with the government. The work of these organizations provided considerable scope for the expansion of the Cadets' influence.

The Octobrist and Progressive parties, also members of the Progressive Bloc, held liberal monarchist views. In allying themselves with the parlia­mentary opposition, they hoped on the one hand to help channel discontent and on the other to persuade Nicholas II to heed the warning voices and change the government, appointing ministers who would "enjoy the con­fidence of the nation."

The revolutionary parties, the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and Social Democrats (Bolsheviks and Mensheviks), sought to combine revolutionary activity with legal opposition in the Duma. During the early years of the war, revolutionary agitation found little response among the people. Par­ticularly unpopular was the Bolsheviks' slogan for a Russian defeat. The arrest of the participants in a Bolshevik conference in Finland in November 1914, including Lev Kamenev, who was presiding, and the party's other Duma representatives, deprived the Bolsheviks of their leadership inside Russia.

It was extremely difficult to direct a revolutionary party from exile. The Okhrana, the tsarist secret police, had infiltrated these parties with their agents and watched their every move. One agent, Evno Azef, dealt a particularly devastating blow to the SRs after becoming the head of its terrorist wing and a member of its Central Committee. Agents provocateurs completely penetrated the Bolshevik party as well. The Old Bolshevik Gusev-Drapkin recalled in his memoirs that in 1908-09 the Bolshevik organization in St. Petersburg was in total disarray.

At that time, provocation was extremely widespread. Sverdlov was a member of the Leningrad committee, with four others. He suspected one of them of being an agent. Well, after the February revolution, when the archives of the Police Department were opened, it turned out that all four had been agents. Sverdlov had been the only Bolshevik on the committee.²⁶

The situation was pretty much the same in the other cities. Roman Malinovsky, a favorite of Lenin's and at one time the head of the Bolshevik group in the Duma and actual leader of the party inside Russia, was one of the Okhrana's most highly prized agents.²⁷

The secret police had a special attitude toward the Bolsheviks. Lenin's policy of systematic divisiveness was in perfect accord with the desires of the police: to prevent unification of the different groupings within the Russian Social Democratic Labor party (RSDLP). A Police Department memorandum urged the heads of "all police organizations to give urgent instructions to their secret collaborators that, when participating in party meetings, they must insistently promote, and defend with conviction, the total impossibility of an organic fusion of the disparate tendencies and in particular the impossibility of a reunification between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks."²⁸ This had been Lenin's position since 1903.

The police entered so fervidly into the revolutionary spirit that they began to use party jargon. They referred to one of the tendencies in the RSDLP as "inclined toward opportunism." Violation of party discipline equally provoked the ire of the police. On June 24, 1909, police headquarters informed the Okhrana chief in Moscow:

Some members of the Bolshevik center, Bogdanov, Marat, and Nikitich (Krasin), have begun to criticize the center, have turned toward otzovizm and ultimatumizm, and after getting hold of a large part of the money stolen at Tiflis, have begun to engage in clandestine agitation against the Bolshevik center in general and some of its members in particular. Thus, they have started a school on the island of Capri, where Gorky lives.²⁹

It seems that the police were less concerned about the bank robbery in Tiflis than about otzovizm, ultimatumizm, and criticism of "the Bolshevik center," that is, of Lenin.

The gendarme general A. Spiridovich, in commenting on the usefulness of secret agents, also noted that their work "very often served the party and hurt the government."³⁰ And Lenin was certainly right when, as a witness on May 26, 1917, before an examining magistrate of the special commission on the Malinovsky affair, he affirmed that this agent had done more good for the party than harm.³¹

SPRING 1917

By the end of 1916 the general discontent that was the result of war weariness, military defeats, and high prices was intensified by reductions in food supplies to Petrograd and Moscow. On January 19, 1917, the "Section for the Maintenance of State Security and Public Order in the Capital" reported in a top secret document that "the rising cost of living and the continual failure of government measures aimed at counteracting the scarcity of food products had provoked a violent wave of discontent, even before Christmas."³²

The food difficulties that began to affect the cities in 1916 stemmed above all from the government's inability to organize the purchase and transportation of agricultural products to the rail terminals. The wartime harvests were even better than those before the war (if the territory occupied by the Germans is not counted). In 1914, 1,413 million centners were harvested. In 1915 the figure was 1,529 million, and in 1916, 1,286 million.³³ It is true that the army consumed more than in peacetime: 28 million centners of food products in 1913—14; 159 million in 1916-17. But at the same time, grain exports fell from 210 million centners in 1913— 1914 to 1 million in 1916-17. The food difficulties were tied to the peasants' refusal to sell their grain at prices constantly eroded by inflation.

The government was unable to understand the reasons behind this crisis. Its attempts to control prices often amounted to nothing better than the measures applied by the governor of Tashkent who strolled through the bazaar on Saturdays and ordered a flogging for any merchant whose prices were, in his view, higher than "normal." Every attempt to organize the provisioning of the cities with the help of specially appointed officials resulted in fiasco. Not knowing what to do, the government kept changing its policies. The politicians had no better grasp of the situation. The right explained the crisis as the result of Jewish and German conspiracies; the Union of the Russian People opened its own "Russian bread stores." The left blamed it on conspiracies by the landowners and kulaks. And everybody agreed that delays on the railroads were at fault. In reality, however, there was an adequate rail system. What was lacking was grain; the trains rushed out after the wheat, but there was no rush of wheat to the trains.³⁴ The top secret police report on the situation in the capital, cited above, concluded that society was longing "to find a way out of an abnormal political situation that is daily becoming more abnormal and strained."³⁵

The parliamentary opposition was increasingly taken with the idea that it must obtain a "responsible ministry" from the tsar, one in which rep­resentatives of the Progressive Bloc would hold the key posts. A group of Duma deputies headed by Aleksandr Guchkov, a confirmed monarchist and leader of the moderate liberals, began to plot the ouster of Nicholas II in order to save the dynasty.

The revolutionary parties, although their slogans against the war and the tsar were finding a growing response in the country, judged that the time was not yet ripe for revolution. In January 1917 Nikolai Chkheidze, a Menshevik leader, member of the Duma, and supporter of the international socialist antiwar conferences at Zimmerwald and Kienthal, argued: "At this time there can be no hope for a successful revolution. I know that the police are trying to organize some simulated revolutionary outbursts in order to draw the workers into the streets and attack them."³⁶ Also in January, Lenin, living in Zurich, totally cut off from Russia and receiving infrequent and confused reports, spoke in the same vein as Chkheidze: "We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution."³⁷ Aleksandr Shlyapnikov, Lenin's representative in Pet­rograd and head of the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee, wrote, "All of the underground organizations and political groups [at the end of 1916] were opposed to mass actions in the coming months of 1917.'^,38

Everyone in the country felt that major changes were imminent and unavoidable—everyone except the revolutionaries. As Shulgin was to say, the revolution was ready but the revolutionaries weren't.

On February 10 Mikhail Rodzyanko, president of the Duma, arrived at the tsar's country palace with a report on the situation and a warning that if the Duma were dissolved, as Nicholas intended, revolution would break out. This revolution, Rodzyanko warned the tsar, "will sweep you away and you will rule no more." "God will provide," answered Russia's last autocrat. In reply he was told: "God will provide nothing. You and your government have made a total mess. Revolution is inevitable."³⁹

The disturbances in Petrograd began even earlier than the president of the Duma had anticipated. On February 23 groups began to gather in various parts of Petrograd demanding bread. Workers walked off the job and joined the demonstrators. On February 26 the Fourth Company of the Pavlovsky Regiment opened fire on the mounted police. The soldiers began siding with the demonstrators.

The parliamentary opposition hoped that the situation could be saved through the creation of a "responsible ministry." In a telegram, Rodzyanko told the tsar:

Anarchy rules in the capital. The government is paralyzed. The transportation of food and fuel is completely disorganized. Social unrest is mounting. The streets are the scene of disorderly shooting. Military units are firing on one another. It is necessary to appoint someone who enjoys the nation's confidence to form a new government. Any delay is out of the question; it would mean death. I pray to God that in this hour, the responsibility does not fall on the monarch.

Upon reading the telegram, Nicholas II said to his minister of the court, Count Frederiks: "Once again, this fat-bellied Rodzyanko has written me a lot of nonsense, which I won't even bother to answer."⁴⁰ The tsar contented himself by giving the Duma a two-month vacation.

Taken by surprise by the burgeoning, spontaneous movement, the rev­olutionary opposition did not know what to do and limited itself to discus­sion. At Kerensky's house, where the representatives of all the revolutionary parties gathered (all Menshevik tendencies, the SRs, the Trudovik, or Labor, group, and the Bolsheviks, represented by Shlyapnikov), the general enthusiasm was soon cooled off by Yurenev, who was close to the Bolsheviks. There is not and there will not be a revolution, he said. The reaction is growing. The soldiers and the workers have different objectives. Prepa­rations must be made for a long period of reaction. We must adopt a wait- and-see attitude.⁴¹ It was evident to all present that Yurenev was articulating the Bolshevik party's point of view. In his memoirs, the Bolshevik worker V. Kayurov, a member of the party's Petrograd Committee, explained how unexpected the events were for the party. He noted that the center had not issued any instructions. The Petrograd Committee had been detained, and Shlyapnikov, the representative of the Central Committee, found himself unable to issue any instructions for the following day. On the evening of February 26 Kayurov had no doubt that the revolution would be crushed. The demonstrators were unarmed; no one would be able to reply to the government when it took energetic measures.⁴² The Bolsheviks held fast to a wait-and-see position, for in the autumn of 1916 Lenin had rigorously forbidden Shlyapnikov to collaborate in any way with the other socialist parties.

If revolutionary agitation in the capital was on the rise without any leadership, it was not because the revolution was strong but because its enemy, the tsarist regime, was extremely weak. "The problem," said Shul- gin, "was that in this immense city it was impossible to find even a few hundred people who sympathized with the ruler."⁴³

By noon on February 27, some 25,000 soldiers—slightly more than 5 percent of all troops and police forces concentrated in Petrograd and its surroundings—had gone over to the side of the demonstrators. But this was enough for the rebellion to become a revolution. It is true that the victors were not yet aware of their victory—no more than the defeated were aware of their defeat. On the evening of February 27, roughly 30,000 soldiers arrived at the Tauride Palace, where the Duma held its sessions, looking for some form of governmental authority. The Duma, which had dreamed of much power, barely had the courage to form a Provisional Committee, which proclaimed that it had assumed the task of restoring order. On February 28 this proclamation was pasted up around the city.

A few hours before the formation of the Duma Committee, a Soviet had been organized in another part of the same Tauride Palace. Addressing itself to the workers of Petrograd, the Soviet asked them to send deputies that same afternoon, on the basis of one deputy per thousand workers. That evening the Soviet elected as its president the Menshevik Chkheidze, and as vice presidents two left-wing deputies from the Duma, Kerensky and Skobelev. The number of Bolsheviks in the Soviet was so small that they were unable to organize themselves as a faction. Shlyapnikov, who was elected to the Soviet's Executive Committee, recalls that its very first meet­ing heard a report on the food situation in Petrograd. It turned out that the situation was "by no means catastrophic."⁴⁴ Thus, the initial cause of the disturbances in the capital leading to the overthrow of the tsar proved to be nonexistent.

While two opposing powers emerged in Petrograd, the Duma Committee and the Soviet, the emperor was traveling from General Headquarters at Mogilev toward the capital. His train was stopped at the station of Dno by insurgent soldiers, and Nicholas was compelled to sign his abdication on March 2, after General Alekseev, supported by the commanders of all five fronts, told him that his abdication was the only possible way to assure the continuation of the war against Germany. Only two corps commanders, Count Keller and Khan Nakhichevansky, spoke on behalf of the tsar. The Duma Committee sent Guchkov and Shulgin, both of them monarchists, to accept the abdication.

Thus, with the agreement of revolutionaries, liberals, and monarchists alike, the monarchy departed. Russia became a democratic republic.

These events unfolded at a very rapid pace, in a way that astounded the participants. And the casualties were very small compared to what they would be later on. In February a total of 169 were killed and less than 1,000 wounded.⁴⁵

From 1916 on, especially in Petrograd, there was constant discussion of plots of one kind or another—revolutionary, liberal, and monarchist— all aimed at rectifying the situation. The only successful plot was the assassination of Rasputin in December 1916. However, this plot can be considered "successful" only in the sense that the "holy father" actually was killed, albeit with difficulty.

When the revolution transferred power to those who were called plotters and who in fact were, consciously or unconsciously, trying to destroy the tsarist regime, it was discovered that none of them had a program.

The Provisional Government created by the Duma Committee was headed by Prince Georgy Lvov, former president of the Union of Zemstvos, and consisted mainly of representatives of the former parliamentary opposition. Its proclaimed purposes were to continue the war and to convoke a Con­stituent Assembly to decide Russia's future. The socialist parties firmly believed that, in accordance with Marxist doctrine, Russia was on the eve of a bourgeois democratic revolution, so that they did not aspire to power themselves. The bourgeoisie had to fulfill its historic task, they believed; only after that would the socialists have their turn. Lenin, however, dis­trusted the February revolution. For him, in Zurich, the Petrograd events looked like the result of a "conspiracy of the Anglo-French imperialists."⁴⁶ His first orders had a familiar ring: no reconciliation with the other parties.⁴⁷

The Provisional Government's weakness, which was evident from the very first day of its existence, its lack of a clear program, its lack of confidence, allowed the Soviet to become a second power in the country. However, the Soviet did not follow a determined course either. On March 1 it issued the famous Order No. 1, which established elected committees in the Petrograd barracks, with the authority to distribute weapons and to withhold them from officers, and abolished the traditional forms of military discipline. This order was immediately extended to the entire army, despite the Soviet's explanation that it was intended for rear echelon units only. This was a major factor in the army's decomposition. However, the Soviet was relying on the army to continue the war against Germany, particularly since Germany had not responded to proposals for "a peace without an­nexations or indemnities." The Bolsheviks too were inconsistent on this question. On March 12 three Bolshevik leaders arrived in Petrograd from internal exile—Muranov, a former Duma deputy; Lev Kamenev, a former member of PravdcCs editorial board; and Stalin, a member of the Central Committee. They immediately took editorial control of Pravda, which on March 15 published an article by Kamenev containing the following sen­tences: "When one army opposes another, the most absurd policy would be to propose that only one lay down its arms and go home. ... A free people will stand firmly at their posts and will answer bullet for bullet."⁴⁸

On April 3 Lenin arrived in Russia. The leader of the Bolshevik party was amazed that he was not arrested after having returned with the help of the German authorities. Instead, representatives of the new government gave him a ceremonious welcome. Everyone, including members of his own party, was dumbfounded by Lenin's speech, which proclaimed the need to struggle for power.

The controversy about Lenin's relations with Germany during the war and the revolution continues to this day. It started in April 1917. "This method of transportation," wrote Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, a close aide of Lenin, referring to the so-called sealed train, "drew frantic howls from the infuriated bourgeoisie, with the SRs and Mensheviks joining in the chorus. Even within our party, there were very many who found this pro­cedure unsuitable and incorrect."⁴⁹

Lenin's strength lay in the fact that for him every method was correct and suitable as long as it sped the revolution's victory. It is necessary, he would teach the Bolsheviks, to know how to use "all subterfuges, ruses, and illegal means, to know how to remain silent, to conceal the truth."⁵⁰ Lenin understood perfectly well that it was in the Germans' interest to help those Russian revolutionaries who favored the defeat of their own country. Ludendorff wrote after the war that revolution in Russia had always been his passionate desire. "How many times I dreamed that it might come about. ... A constant vision." This vision suddenly became real, a saving miracle. "In April and May 1917," wrote the German general, "despite our victories on the Aisne and in Champagne, only the Russian revolution saved us."⁵¹ Although Lenin's activities were not carried out with this aim in mind, the fact that the Russian revolution saved Germany from defeat in 1917 did not trouble the Bolshevik leader, who yearned for power re­gardless of the cost.

The April Theses, a program presented by Lenin on April 4 to RSDLP delegates attending an all-Russia conference of soviets, surprised everyone, including the Bolsheviks, by its unexpected character. Perhaps the party members would have been less surprised if they had had the chance to read Lenin's "Letters from Afar," sent from Switzerland. But Pravda had published an abridged version of the first letter and suppressed the other three altogether. The editors of Pravda, Kamenev and Stalin, had their own plan: to unite with the Mensheviks and collaborate to a certain degree with the Provisional Government. Pravda published Lenin's theses in its April 7 issue, but the next day it commented on his views in a statement by the editors: "In regard to Comrade Lenin's general scheme, we find it unacceptable in that it proceeds from the assumption that the bourgeois democratic revolution has been completed and anticipates an immediate transformation of this revolution into a socialist revolution."

One could not find a better articulation of the differences between the editors of Pravda, who had been the party's leaders in Lenin's absence, and Lenin himself. For Kamenev, Stalin, and the other Bolsheviks, Marxism was a doctrine from which deviation was not possible, whereas for Lenin there were no dogmatic truths: he was possessed by one idea—power. In the April 4 meeting at which the theses were presented, according to Bonch- Bruevich, an eyewitness, Lenin drew "sarcastic smiles" and "some chuck­ling" from his audience when he "stated candidly that he had had very little time and little material to base his observations on." With the ex­ception of some brief weeks during 1905, Lenin had not been in Russia since 1900. In April 1917, en route to Petrograd, "I met only one worker on the train," the Bolshevik leader admitted. But that was good enough. "My thoughts," said he, "might be a bit theoretical, but I suggest that on the whole they are correct and correspond to the general political situation in the country."⁵²

Lenin could have had worse luck and not run into that worker on the train. But even without him, Lenin grasped what was essential in Russia's political situation: the country had become, according to him, the freest in the world; that is, the government was weak and open to challenge.

The April Theses were both a concrete program and a Utopian one. The concrete demands were an end to the imperialist war, fraternization with the enemy, and confiscation of large landholdings and nationalization of all lands, which were then to come under the control of the local soviets. All these demands were directed toward the Provisional Government, which was, as Lenin knew, incapable of satisfying them. Consequently, it would have to be overthrown. The Utopian parts of the program—the abolition of the police, the army, and civil service; the election of officials subject to recall at any time, with salaries not to exceed those of an average worker's— these were the promises of a future government. It is true that Lenin's program was one of "unabashed radicalism" and "primitive demagogy," as Sukhanov said.⁵³ But it took into account the two principal demands of the majority of the population—peace and land.

After the February revolution, the Petrograd Soviet began to receive numerous nakazy (mandates), expressing above all the complaints and desires of the peasants and workers. An examination of the first one hundred peasant mandates shows that they called first for the confiscation of the large landed estates and the crown lands and for their distribution to the peasantry and, second, for the prompt conclusion of a "just peace." The first one hundred mandates presented by the workers show that they were less revolutionary-minded than the peasants. The workers sought mainly the improvement of their situation (the eight-hour workday, higher wages, etc.), not a fundamental transformation. For example, 23 percent of the peasant mandates demanded peace, as opposed to only 2 percent of the workers' mandates.⁵⁴

The peasants' demands for peace coincided in part with Lenin's defeatist slogans; their desires for land ran counter to the Bolshevik program. The head of the party instantly forgot the old scholastic disputes over the agrarian question which for many years had created divisions in the Social Demo­cratic party ("municipalization," "socialization," "nationalization"). He simply appropriated the program of the SRs: land to the peasants.

April 1917 may be regarded as the birthdate of Soviet ideology. This was the first manifestation, on a scale affecting the destinies of the state, of an extremely important feature of this ideology, soon to become the dominant one: flexibility, free of all fetters, a capacity to accept instanta­neously what it had previously condemned and to condemn what it had previously accepted. Related to this are two essential elements: the leader can decide to make a 180-degree turn; and the party, with some hesitation to be sure, fairly quickly will fall into line.

Lenin, unfettered by any restraints and commanding a party which had 77,000 members in April 1917,⁵⁵ confronted a Provisional Government constrained by the fact that it held only half the power, the other half being held by the soviets. The government's hands were also tied by the lack of a state apparatus. The former machinery of state had been dismantled and discarded as a vestige of tsarist rule, and the creation of a new apparatus was delayed by the emergence of dual power everywhere, the local soviets successfully challenging the young administration of the Provisional Gov­ernment. Lastly, the Provisional Government was hobbled by moral stan­dards and sentiments that would soon be regarded as "survivals of capitalism," such as keeping one's promises, being loyal to one's allies, and having faith in democracy and the people. The representatives of the moderate socialist parties (SRs and Mensheviks), who from the days of the first coalition in May 1917 played a growing role in the Provisional Gov­ernment, were hampered by their theoretical views concerning history and revolution, by the belief that social classes come to power in a certain sequence, following historic laws. Moreover, the members of the Provisional Government seemed to find power too hot to handle, as if waiting for the moment when they could be rid of it. "On April 20," Shlyapnikov writes, "Kamenev criticized the Provisional Government at a meeting of the Ex­ecutive Committee of the Soviet: 'The solution is to transfer power to another class.' Some voices came from the ministerial benches: 'Then you take the power.'"⁵⁶ In June, at the Congress of Soviets, Tsereteli protested with a certain sadness that at the time there was no political party in Russia willing to say, "Give us the power." Then came Lenin's famous reply: "There is such a party. No party can refuse power, and our party certainly does not." The Provisional Government believed that no one in Russia wanted power. Lenin's words were not taken seriously. History has shown that when such politicians as Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler did tell the truth about their intentions no one believed them.

The weakness of the government left nothing to stand in the way of the revolutionary tide sweeping over Russia. The revolution became a blind revolt, giving vent to popular hatreds that had accumulated over the cen­turies. The intelligentsia, which for decades had laid the groundwork for revolution, now looked upon it with bewilderment. In his diary Gorky voiced the intellectuals' feelings: "We worshipped the revolution like romantic lovers. But a shameless brute came along and violated our beloved."⁵⁷ The Provisional Government, the government of the Russian intelligentsia, was unavoidably drifting to the left, attempting to catch up with the rebelling masses but always lagging behind, because the people, spurred on by Lenin's extremist slogans, dreamed of an end to all government. No one could be expected to outdo Lenin in the field of revolutionary slogans; he preached the expropriation of the expropriators, a phrase which translated into simple language had an irresistibly attractive ring: "Steal back what was stolen."⁵⁸

In June, Kerensky, as minister of war, was able to persuade the army that an offensive was possible. On June 18 the Russian troops went into action, scoring major successes. Rumors concerning a tightening of military discipline sowed alarm among the soldiers of the Petrograd garrison, who feared they might be sent to the front. Demands for the overthrow of the Provisional Government received a favorable hearing, especially with the First Machine Gun Regiment, which was strongly influenced by the Bol­sheviks and anarchocommunists.

During the preparations for the armed demonstration of July 4 by Petro­grad workers and soldiers joined by 10,000 sailors from Kronstadt, Lenin left the capital to rest at Bonch-Bruevich's country home in Finland. He returned on July 4 and spoke without enthusiasm to the demonstrators from the balcony of Kshesinskaya's palace. It was clear to him that he would not be able to seize power at this time.

To this day historians disagree as to whether this demonstration was the result of a Bolshevik plot or was a spontaneous movement of the workers, soldiers, and sailors. Even the official historians of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union have not come to a definite conclusion. In his History of the CPSU, Short Course, Stalin wrote: "The Bolshevik party was opposed to armed action at that time, for it considered that the revolutionary crisis had not yet matured, that the army and the provinces were not yet prepared to support an uprising in the capital."⁵⁹ However, the post-Stalin version of the History says that the "workers and soldiers of Petrograd would have had enough forces to overthrow the Provisional Government and take power," but that it was still too early for such an action because the "majority of the population was still following the SRs and Mensheviks."⁶⁰

Lenin did not object to the July actions, but he did not insist on their continuation after troops loyal to the government and the Soviet entered Petrograd. For him, the July demonstrations were a rehearsal, a test of the adversary's will to resist. Zinoviev recalled the situation:

During the July days our entire Central Committee was opposed to an im­mediate takeover. Lenin thought the same. But when, on July 3, the wave of popular indignation rose high, Comrade Lenin sprang into action. There and then, in the refreshment room on the top floor of the Tauride Palace, a small meeting was held—Trotsky, Lenin, and myself. Laughing, Lenin said to us: "Shouldn't we try for it now?" But he immediately added: "No, we couldn't take power now; it wouldn't work out, because not all the soldiers at the front are with us yet."⁶¹

Zinoviev is slightly mistaken, because on July 3 Lenin was not in Petro­grad. Nevertheless, Zinoviev accurately describes Lenin's attitude toward the demonstration: if it succeeds, we will take power, "laughing"; if it fails, we will try again.

The July rehearsal ended unhappily for the Bolsheviks, mainly be­cause the Petrograd Soviet supported the Provisional Government. Bonch- Bruevich recalls a conversation with Lenin after the July disaster: "'What now?' I asked Vladimir Ilyich. 'Armed insurrection. There's no other way.' 'When?' 'When circumstances allow. But no later than the fall.'"⁶² It could be that Bonch-Bruevich, who wrote his memoir after the party's victory, exaggerated Lenin's optimism a bit. On July 5, when Trotsky met with the Bolshevik leader, Lenin was in a panic: "'Now they will shoot us down, one by one,' he said. This is the right time for them.' But he overestimated the opponent—not his venom, but his courage and ability to act."⁶³

Lenin had good reason to worry. One of the decisive arguments that convinced the troops loyal to the Provisional Government and the Soviet to move against the demonstrators were documents suggesting that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were German spies. In his History of the Russian Rev­olution, Trotsky referred to July 1917 as "the month of the most gigantic slander in world history." The accusation that the Bolsheviks had received German money was used to justify the Provisional Government's decision to arrest the Bolshevik leaders. Lenin fled to Finland. The arrested Bol­shevik leaders, Kamenev, Kollontai, Lunacharsky, and Trotsky, were soon released.

The controversy over "German money" continues even today. In this argument two different questions have to be distinguished: (1) Was Lenin a German agent? (2) Were the Bolsheviks receiving money from Germany?

First of all, the defeated have always denounced the leaders of victorious revolutions as "agents of foreign powers." This most primitive explanation for their own defeat actually explains very little. The concept of a foreign agent suggests a person carrying out the will of another. There is no question that Lenin was his own man and was pursuing his own aims, which at a certain stage coincided with those of Germany. And within a year many of those who had accused Lenin of collaborating with the Kaiser's Germany availed themselves of German aid in the struggle against Lenin's govern­ment.

As to whether or not the Bolsheviks had any German financial support, revolutionary leaders have always been accused—most often, justly—of receiving money from foreign powers. In July 1917 documents were pub­lished attesting to links between two Bolsheviks, Hanetsky and Kozlovsky, and the German Social Democrat Parvus, who made no attempt to conceal his links with the German Foreign Ministry. Lenin bitterly denied these accusations, but his denials were strange and not very convincing. For example, he wrote that Hanetsky had only "engaged in business as an employee" of Parvus's firm.⁶⁴ The party, Lenin asserted, could not have had any dealings with Parvus because since 1915 Lenin had denounced him as a "German Plekhanov" and a "renegade," "licking Hindenburg's boots."⁶⁵ In fact, Lenin stated categorically: "It is an infamous lie that I was in contact with Parvus."⁶⁶ Lenin had not had any relations with him; it was his emissaries who were responsible. Despite all the denials of Lenin, Trotsky, and other party leaders, none of them ever explained how it was possible by August 1917 for the party to be publishing, according to Lenin's own figures, "seventeen daily papers, 1,415,000,000 copies weekly alto­gether, 320,000 daily."⁶⁷

Mark Aldanov, a talented writer of historical novels and an astute his­torian, who in 1919 wrote the first biography of Lenin, discussed this question in a Russian emigre newspaper in 1935. He recalled one small party that before 1917 had engaged in very little agitational work, pub­lished a small paper, and spent about 300,000 rubles a year, a sum obtained from a few wealthy members.⁶⁸ Shlyapnikov, whose honesty there is no reason to doubt, informs us that from December 2, 1916, to February 1, 1917, the amount that came into the Bolshevik coffers was 1,117 rubles, 50 kopecks.⁶⁹ In March, in a fit of generosity, Gorky donated 3,000 rubles.⁷⁰ Trotsky, in denouncing "the most gigantic slander in world history," contends that the money needed for the Bolshevik press was donated by ordinary workers. Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine that in the midst of severe inflation the workers were able to give tens or hundreds of thousands of rubles weekly to a party that was far from the only workers' party and not even the main socialist party. Aldanov speculated in 1935: "The account books kept on the Wilhelmstrasse could prove to be precious documents on the history of the October Revolution, but history will not gain access to them very soon. Moreover, the records in those books are probably quite one-sided. Receipts are not given in such cases."⁷¹ Aldanov was mistaken. History got hold of the "account books" of the German Foreign Ministry only ten years after he had written those lines. It is true that no receipts bearing Lenin's signature were found—but German doc­uments referring to the transfer of funds to the Bolsheviks were.

German money, however, does not explain the success of Bolshevik propaganda. It may have allowed them to conduct their propaganda on a large scale, but the government had no less substantial amounts of money at its disposal. The important thing was knowing how to use it.

The July defeat and the general conviction that the Bolsheviks were German agents marked a delay in Lenin's ascent to power. But the situation in the country became more critical every day: defeats on the front (the German army was threatening Riga and Narva and, to the south, Moldavia and Bessarabia); inflation and unemployment were on the rise; and food supplies were short. The second coalition government, formed in July and headed by Kerensky, put off the most pressing problems until the end of the war, at which time a Constituent Assembly would be convoked. On August 26 Commander-in-Chief Kornilov decided to intervene. He ordered General Krymov's Third Cossack Army Corps to Petrograd. He wanted to put an end to the nation's disintegration, reestablish order, and punish the Bolsheviks, whom he considered responsible for the chaos. However, his action brought the opposite result. A very courageous soldier who had won fame in the world war, Kornilov was a total incompetent in political matters. What was called the Kornilov plot was nothing but a confused blunder. Although he lacked sufficient forces and allies, Kornilov directly challenged the Petrograd Soviet, which, seeing its power threatened, sought help from the Bolsheviks. The moderate socialist Voitinsky, commissar of the Northern Front, assured the Soviet's leaders, "Not one regiment, not one company of the Northern Front will obey Kornilov's orders without the approval of the Army Committee or myself."⁷²

Kornilov's troops faded away like ghosts even before reaching Petrograd. Meanwhile the Bolsheviks had been cleared of the accusations brought against them only a few weeks before by the very same Soviet and govern­ment that now gave them the seal of approval as good revolutionaries. The Committee of Struggle Against Counterrevolution, formed by the Soviet, included Vladimir Nevsky, the leader of the Bolshevik's Military Organi­zation, which at that time had 26,000 members operating in forty-three groups at the front and seventeen in the rear.⁷³

When he learned of Kornilov's military action, Lenin immediately ordered that he be fought, but that Kerensky not be supported, that as many concessions as possible be wrested from him, and that the Bolsheviks make use of the situation to arm the workers. The course of events, he wrote, could bring the Bolsheviks to power this time, "but we must speak of this as little as possible in our propaganda."⁷⁴ The party began its final sprint on the road to power.

FALL 1917

The overthrow of the autocracy changed the situation in Russia, but only for the worse. The economy was collapsing, factories shutting down, food supplies dwindling, and the value of the currency plummeting. Meanwhile, the war went on. The only real conquest of the revolution was total freedom of expression. This intoxicating freedom became a powerful weapon in the hands of the Bolsheviks; while they promised everything at once (peace, land, and bread), the other parties suggested waiting for victory, for the Constituent Assembly, for an end to the chaos. Late in the night of August 31 or early in the morning of September 1, the Bolsheviks won a majority in the Petrograd Soviet. On September 25 Trotsky was elected chairman of the Soviet. After returning to Russia from the United States in May 1917, Trotsky had immediately supported Lenin. In July he joined the Bolshevik party and was placed in its leadership. Arrested after the July events, he was released on bail from Kresty prison after the fiasco of Kornilov's at­tempted coup. As president of the Petrograd Soviet, Trotsky became not only the tribune of the revolution (his speeches drawing overflow crowds to the Modern Circus) but also de facto leader of the insurrection being planned. On September 5 the Bolsheviks won a majority in the Moscow Soviet. This was a signal for Lenin: it convinced him that power was within easy reach. In mid-September, from his hiding place in Finland, he sent two letters stressing the need for an immediate seizure of power. But the Central Committee needed a lot of persuasion. Some of the party's leaders— Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Stalin, in particular—held a much more moderate position than Lenin. They were convinced that the All-Russia Congress of Soviets, scheduled for October 25, would peacefully deliver power to the Bolsheviks. Finding the situation intolerable, Lenin returned to Petrograd. Until now, Soviet historians have been unable to agree on the date of the party leader's return from Finland. According to Stalin's Short Course, Lenin returned on October 7.⁷⁵ Margarita Fofanova, at whose Petrograd apartment Lenin stayed, attests that he came back on September 22.⁷⁶ What is known for certain is that on October 10 he was present at a crucial Central Committee meeting, together with Bubnov, Dzerzhinsky, Zinoviev, Kame­nev, Kollontai, Lomov, Sokolnikov, Sverdlov, Stalin, Trotsky, and Uritsky. Lenin had considerable difficulty persuading his comrades of the need to organize an insurrection; however, he had one trump card. As early as September 29 he had sent an ultimatum in the form of a letter, threatening to resign from the Central Committee, while reserving the right to "campaign among the rank and file of the party and at the party congress."⁷⁷ In 1921, while Lenin was still alive, Bukharin remembered that the "letter was written with extraordinary force and threatened us with all sorts of punish­ments. We were all astounded. ... The Central Committee unanimously decided to burn the letter."⁷⁸ Burning a letter in Lenin's absence was one thing. But on October 10, when Lenin demanded in person that a vote on the insurrection be taken, Zinoviev and Kamenev were the only two who had the courage to vote against.

Lenin's argument amounted to these five points: (1) the revolutionary movement was on the rise all over Europe; (2) the imperialists (the Germans and the Allies) were ready to make peace in order to join forces and strangle the Russian revolution; (3) there was undeniable evidence that Kerensky and company were preparing to surrender Petrograd to the Germans; (4) a peasant revolt was developing, and the Bolsheviks already had the people's confidence; and (5) obvious preparations were underway for a second Kor- nilov attempt. Zinoviev objected: "We are told (1) that the majority of the Russian people are with us and (2) that the majority of the international proletariat are with us. Alas, both assertions are false and that is the heart of the problem."

In fact, that was not the problem. All of Lenin's arguments proved false: (1) his hopes for a world revolution were misplaced; (2) the Germans and the Allies continued the war for another full year; (3) Kerensky had no intention of surrendering Petrograd; (4) the peasants had begun dividing up the land, but this was far from being a "peasant revolt"; (5) and no one was dreaming of a "second Kornilov attempt." Lenin was right about only one thing: power was available for the taking, and no one was willing to defend the government. Kerensky and his ministers persisted in seeing the right as the only enemy, and naturally this eliminated any type of support from the right. The weakness and indecision of the Provisional Government irritated the "moderates" and "centrists." Bukharin proudly remembered that "on the door to my apartment was written 'Bukharin, Bolshevik.' But nobody dared to raise their little finger to me. Of course it was really stupid on the part of the bourgeoisie not to have finished us off at that time."⁷⁹ Bukharin was certainly right to call it stupidity, except that in the fall of 1917 power was not in the hands of the bourgeoisie. Power was in the streets and everyone agreed that "things had to change," even if for the worse. Pierre Pascal, a member of the French military mission, noted in his diary in September that the "corps of pages voted for the Bolsheviks," and in October that "yesterday Mr. Putilov told me he had voted for the Bolsheviks."⁸⁰

Lenin found the greatest resistance in the Central Committee of his own party; his comrades feared failure and wondered what they would do upon taking power. He answered them: 'The seizure of power is the business of the uprising; its political purpose will become clear after the seizure."⁸¹ He freely quoted Napoleon: "On s'engage et puis—on voit."

For over sixty years Soviet historiography has maintained the legend that the October revolution was a meticulously planned operation, a classic model of "the art of insurrection." This legend is not in keeping with the facts. Moreover, in the legend, the leaders of this perfect operation keep changing. First it was Lenin and Trotsky. On the first anniversary of the revolution, Stalin referred to "the Central Committee of the party, headed by Comrade Lenin," as the inspirer of the insurrection but stressed that "all the work of practical organization of the insurrection proceeded under the direct leadership of the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, Trotsky."⁸² Trotsky himself contributed a good deal to the legend of the splendidly organized insurrection. Later on, in the 1930s, Stalin portrayed himself as the leader of the insurrection, while acknowledging that Lenin had provided some help. Since the mid-1950s, Lenin has been the only recognized leader.

But doubts regarding the reliability of the legend could not be better founded. Suffice it to say that to this day Soviet historians disagree about the date on which the October revolution began. Some suggest it was the morning of October 24; others say the evening of that day; still others argue for October 22, the day the Petrograd Soviet assumed control over all military units in the capital.

On October 10 the Central Committee had voted for insurrection. But at its next meeting, on October 16, everyone insisted it was necessary to wait because delegates from various parts of Petrograd spoke of the lack of combativity, especially in the workers' districts of Vyborg, Narva, and Vasilevsky Island. Krylenko, the representative of the Petrograd Military Organization (PMO), reported indifference among the soldiers. Only Lenin kept urging and arguing, dragging the Central Committee on toward power.

Trotsky seemed to be everywhere, speaking at countless meetings, rous­ing the workers and soldiers with his revolutionary appeals. The other popular Bolshevik speakers, Lunacharsky, Kollontai, Volodarsky, also kept up an endless round of speeches. The Central Committee was waiting for power to fall into its hands like ripe fruit, but Lenin insisted on the need to seize it, and no later than October 20.

The existing forms of authority were collapsing. The peasant soldiers of the Petrograd garrison wanted one thing: to go home and take part in the distribution of land. The government did not know what it wanted. It did not know which forces were on its side, and above all it did not seem to recognize its enemies. Petrograd was full of rumors about a Bolshevik plot, rumors which reached their peak in October. On October 17 Gorky's news­paper, Novaya zhizn (New life), which had a circulation of 10,000 among Petrograd workers and which stood very close to the Bolsheviks,⁸³ published an editorial warning the Bolshevik party against an uprising that would bring ruin to the party, the working class, and the revolution. On October 18 it published the famous letter from Zinoviev and Kamenev in which Lenin's close comrades declared that an armed insurrection, just a few days before the Second Congress of Soviets, would be an unacceptable action threatening the proletariat and the revolution with catastrophe. Lenin's indignation upon reading this letter is well known; he called its authors traitors and "strike breakers" because they had given away the secret of the insurrection to the bourgeoisie. In reality, it had not been a secret to anyone for a long time. Lenin himself had given it away in articles, letters, and public proclamations printed in the Bolshevik press.

The question of armed insurrection was openly debated in the legal press, but the most typical sign of the decomposition of government machinery was that the authorities did not seem to consider these discussions impor­tant. Kerensky refused to call in reinforcements from the front. Out of sheer curiosity a city official called the apartment of Maria Ulyanova, Lenin's sister, and learned that Lenin was in Petrograd, but no one attempted to arrest the leader of the impending insurrection.

In an interview with the American ambassador, David Francis, Foreign Affairs Minister Tereshchenko described the government's state of mind with desperate frankness. The interview took place on October 24. "I expect a Bolshevik action tonight," said Tereshchenko. "If you can crush it," said the ambassador, "I hope it happens." "I think we could," Tereshchenko replied, "but I hope it happens anyway, whether we crush it or not. I'm tired of this uncertainty and tension."⁸⁴

The Bolsheviks were not sure of their success, but they kept moving toward power, as though drawn by the collapsing weight of the existing government. They were coming to power, albeit somewhat more slowly than Lenin would have liked. The Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC), created by the Petrograd Soviet, became the main leadership body of the insurrection. The seizure of power was carried out, not in the name of the Bolshevik party, but in the name of the Soviet, although the central bureau of the MRC consisted only of Bolsheviks and Left SRs. In fact, power passed into the hands of the MRC bureau on October 21, when it issued an order to stop any weapons from being given out without its authorization and sent commissars into the military units to make sure that this edict was enforced. On the morning of October 22, the garrison was notified by telephone of this decision, which specified among other things that no order would be valid unless signed by the Military Revolutionary Committee. Meetings and demonstrations were organized in the capital. Trotsky gave a fiery speech at the House of the People, promising that the Soviet gov­ernment would give the poor and the front-line soldiers everything they would ever want, beginning with bread, land, and peace.

The revolution had already happened, although nobody was aware of it. Those who filled Petrograd's theaters did not notice. Chaliapin sang Don Carlos, a part he rarely performed in Russia. Tamara Karsavina danced for the first time in the operetta The Doll. All kinds of philosophical, literary, and sociopolitical lectures attracted large audiences. Even the members of the Provisional Government failed to notice that power had slipped from their fingers into the hands of the Bolsheviks.

Lenin's behavior during these days is still an enigma. After October 20 he seems to have disappeared. He remained in hiding, but there is no evidence of his activity in the form of letters, notes, or instructions until the evening of October 24. The much touted Central Committee meeting of October 21, where Lenin supposedly uttered the famous words, "Yes­terday was too soon, the day after tomorrow will be too late," is only a legend created by John Reed that no document or witness supports. It is true, however, that when Lenin read Reed's book, the legend struck him as so felicitous that he did not correct it.

Lenin stayed underground throughout the day of October 24, as the Military Revolutionary Committee began sending out commissars and small armed detachments to secure government buildings. Two unarmed com­missars went to the central telegraph office and brought it under Bolshevik control. A detachment from the Izmailovsky Regiment appeared at the Baltic Railway Station and stayed there to "maintain order." Detachments of Red Guards occupied some bridges but left others in the hands of government troops—in cases where the troops refused to withdraw. No one wanted to shoot. But little by little power in the capital changed hands. Meanwhile, as late as 6 PM Lenin did not suspect a thing. He sent out an urgent letter stressing that the situation was extremely critical, that it was necessary to deal a death blow to the government. In the fourth and fifth Russian editions of Lenin's works this letter is entitled "Letter to Central Committee Members." Actually Soviet historians added this title; the letter was addressed to the district committees of the party, through which Lenin meant to exert pressure on the Central Committee. On the evening of October 24, far from Smolny Institute, Lenin still feared the Provisional Government, which was no longer in power, and continued to urge the Central Committee to begin an insurrection that was already practically over.

The enigma of Lenin's absence from leadership between October 20 and 24 is doubled by the mystery of the insurrection leaders' behavior. They refrained from inviting Lenin to Smolny Institute, the seat of the Petrograd Soviet and the Bolshevik Central Committee at that time, the whole day of October 24, while he, no less curiously, awaited their invitation. Stalin wrote, in his commemorative article of November 6, 1918, "On the evening of October 24, Lenin was summoned to Smolny to lead the movement as a whole." However, by the time the Central Committee considered it ap­propriate to summon their chief, Lenin had already lost patience and was in a streetcar heading for Smolny.

In his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky says that Lenin, upon his arrival at Smolny, approved the actions of the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. "Lenin was in rapture, which he expressed by exclaiming, laughing, and rubbing his hands. Afterward he became more silent, reflected a moment and said: 'Oh, well, it can be done that way too. As long as we take power.'"⁸⁵ Nikolai Podvoisky, who together with Vladimir Antonov- Ovseenko and Grigory Chudnovsky was in direct command of operations, recalled that after Lenin arrived at Smolny he began showering them with notes: Have the telegraph office and telephone exchange been taken? And the bridges?⁸⁶

Lenin's impatience had little influence on the course of events, however. Slowly but surely the city was passing into the hands of the insurgents,

who encountered no resistance. The battle for the city (no one yet realized that it was a battle for the entire country) was waged by 6,000 or 7,000 Bolshevik supporters (2,500 soldiers from the Pavlovsky and Kexholm regiments, 2,500 sailors from Kronstadt, and about 2,000 Red Guards) and 1,500-2,000 defenders of the Provisional Government. The enormous Petrograd garrison declared itself neutral and did not intervene. At 3:30 am the cruiser Aurora dropped anchor near the Nikolaevsky Bridge, and a detachment of sailors chased off the Provisional Government's patrol and occupied the bridge. The Winter Palace, seat of the Provisional Govern­ment, was isolated from the rest of the city.

In the morning, the ministers still did not know they had lost power. They could not have learned it from the newspapers, whose articles were hopelessly out of date; Izvestia cautioned the Bolsheviks against any "foolish adventure"; Novaya zhizn counseled them "not to be the first to fire"; the Menshevik newspaper Rabochaya gazeta (Workers' gazette) hoped for a compromise.

By this time Lenin knew that he had won. At about 10 am he wrote a proclamation 'To the Citizens of Russia," announcing, "The Provisional Government has been deposed," and stating, 'The cause for which the people have fought, namely, the immediate offer of a democratic peace, the abolition of landed proprietorship, workers' control over production, and the establishment of Soviet power—this cause has been secured." Trotsky recalled that after writing this proclamation Lenin turned around "with a tired smile and said, This change—hiding underground from Pereverzev's police one moment, being in power the next... Es schwindelt' [it makes you dizzy.] He supplemented his words with an eloquent gesture of his hand: round and round his forehead," to show how it made his head spin to have gained power at last.⁸⁷ The Winter Palace, it is true, had not yet been taken. But Lenin wanted at all costs to announce victory to the first session of the Congress of Soviets. He began therefore to send notes to the members of the Military Revolutionary Committee demanding an immediate attack. This time the tone was different. He threatened to have the members of the committee shot if the order was not carried out.⁸⁸ A new era had begun. Threats of execution and later actual executions were to become essential elements of policy.

The taking of the Winter Palace was a long, drawn out affair. The Red Guards and soldiers were not particularly anxious to launch an attack, especially since the number of defenders was decreasing by the hour. The insurgents entered by ones and twos through the "servants' entrance" of the palace, which was not defended. The Aurora fired some blanks, giving

the signal to the Peter and Paul Fortress to direct its artillery fire against the Winter Palace; after firing about thirty shells, the gunners succeeded in hitting their target only two or three times. More and more Red Guards were entering the palace. Initially, the officer cadets defending tl*e Pro­visional Government took the Red Guards prisoner. Then, as the Red Guards' numbers grew, they took the cadets prisoner and disarmed them. Antonov-Ovseenko made his way into the palace and arrested the members of the Provisional Government, then sent a telegram to Lenin: 'The Winter Palace was taken at 2:04 am."

The Congress of Soviets, which by then consisted only of Bolsheviks and Left SRs, the Mensheviks and Right SRs having walked out in protest against the seizure of power, approved the formation of a "provisional workers' and peasants' government." It was called the Council of People's Commissars, or Sovnarkom, and was to rule "until the convocation of the Constituent Assembly." This government was made up entirely of Bolsheviks. Its pres­ident was Lenin; Trotsky became people's commissar of foreign affairs; Rykov, internal affairs; Milyutin, agriculture; Lomov, justice; Nogin, com­merce and industry; Shlyapnikov, labor; Teodorovich, food; Lunacharsky, education; and Stalin, nationalities. Thus the October revolution was com­pleted.

"In some respects, a revolution is a miracle," Lenin later wrote.⁸⁹ And so it must have seemed. For the second time within the year a government, stricken with impotence, was toppled by a flick of the finger. In October, as in February, the government discovered at the critical moment that it had no support. The difference between the two revolutions was that in February the tsarist government was swept aside by an explosion of universal discontent, whereas in October the Provisional Government was overthrown by a party led by a man who knew what he wanted and who was firmly persuaded that he incarnated the laws of history, that he alone had fully assimilated the teachings of Marx and Engels.

Lenin got what he wanted; the Bolshevik party came to the Congress of Soviets with power in its hands. To achieve this goal he had had to overcome the resistance of his comrades, which was far more serious than that of the Provisional Government. The "rightist" enemies of the Provisional Gov­ernment—generals and officers—were convinced that if the Bolsheviks came to power they could not hold on to it for more than a few weeks and that in the meantime at least Kerensky would have been ousted.

On October 25 the first session of the Congress of Soviets adopted two decrees presented by Lenin, on peace and on land. For the first and last time, the Bolshevik chief kept his word; he gave the country peace and land. Soon a new war would break out, a civil war this time, which would last more than three years. As for the land, it would turn out that the landlords had much less than was believed for the peasants to take, and soon the state would confiscate everything grown on the land anyway. Meanwhile, on October 25 Lenin read aloud the text of the decree on peace, which called upon the peoples and governments of all the belligerent coun­tries to agree to a just and democratic peace without annexations or in­demnities and an immediate three-month armistice to allow for peace negotiations. His decree on land stated in part: "All land... shall be confiscated without compensation [in any form] and become the property of the whole people."⁹⁰

Lenin included in the Decree on Land the exact wording of a program drawn up by an SR newspaper. This program was based on 242 "mandates" submitted by local peasant representatives to the All-Russia Congress of Peasant Deputies, held in Petrograd in August 1917. Commenting on the program at that time, Lenin wrote: "The peasants want to keep their small farms. ... No sensible socialist will differ with the peasant poor over this." He added that as long as "political power is taken over by the proletariat, the rest will come by itself."⁹¹

Lenin was able to listen calmly to the angry SRs at the Second Congress of Soviets as they denounced him for "stealing their program." "A fine Marxist this is," they said, "who has harassed us for fifteen years from the heights of his Marxist grandeur, for being petit bourgeois and unscientific, but who no sooner seizes power than he implements our program." To which he responded calmly: "A fine party it is which had to be driven from power before its program could be implemented."⁹² Lenin was calm because he alone knew that without the support of the peasantry he could not retain power, and that as long as he had power, he could easily take back what he had given and what he had promised.

In the week after the insurrection, a few half-hearted and uncoordinated attempts by the former government to oppose the new one ended in failure. Kerensky, who had left the Winter Palace on the morning of October 25, sought aid at Pskov, the site of Northern Front general headquarters. Only General Krasnov, commander of the Third Cavalry Corps, took up the defense of the Provisional Government, the same Krasnov who under Gen­eral Krymov's orders had marched on Petrograd in August to overthrow the Kerensky government. Krasnov managed to gather together only 700 cav­alrymen, "less than a normal regiment."⁹³ But these modest forces allowed him nonetheless to occupy Gatchina and then Tsarskoe Selo. On October 30 detachments of the Red Guard, reinforced by sailors, stopped the Cos­sacks' advance at the hills of Pulkovo outside Petrograd. Trotsky wrote that this victory belonged to a Colonel Valden, who had accepted the command of the Red Guards, "not because he agreed with us," but apparently because "he hated Kerensky so much that this hatred awoke a certain sympathy for us in him."⁹⁴ Krasnov ordered a retreat to Gatchina, where he was arrested. Kerensky had time to flee, thus ending his brief passage through Russian history.

While General Krasnov in his strange alliance with the socialist Kerensky led several hundred Cossacks on Petrograd, General Cheremisov, com­mander of the Northern Front, considered the country's main danger to be the "German of Berlin," against whom the front had to be maintained; as for the Bolsheviks, the "Germans of Petrograd," they would not be able to stay in power anyhow. At the same time, the representatives of the "rev­olutionary democrats," the Mensheviks and Right SRs, formed a Union for the Salvation of the Homeland and the Revolution. But their struggle against the Bolsheviks remained verbal.

During his first week in power the most serious resistance Lenin ran into came from his closest comrades in the Central Committee and the government. It broke out on two fronts, when the All-Russia Executive Committee of the Railroad Workers' Union, the Vikzhel, demanded on October 29 that a "homogeneous socialist government" including all the socialist parties be formed. Their demand included the threat of a general railroad strike. The poet Alexander Blok was wrong when he wrote, 'The Vikzhel has shown the breadth of its black hands." The Vikzhel's "hands" were not "black" (that is to say, reactionary) but pink. During the October days, the neutral position of the union, which refused to allow military trains into Petrograd, had contributed to the Bolshevik victory. And when the union issued its ultimatum, the Central Committee agreed to the "ne­cessity of broadening the base of the government and the possibility of changing its composition." It did this in Lenin's and Trotsky's absence. The former was leading the suppression of a desperate attempt by the officer cadets to start an insurrection in the city; the latter was mobilizing forces against Krasnov. A Central Committee delegation headed by Kamenev went to a meeting called by the Vikzhel and agreed to the proposal of a coalition government made up of eighteen members, five of them Bolsheviks, but excluding Lenin and Trotsky. A delegation of workers from the Putilov Factory declared at this meeting: "We will not allow bloodshed between the revolutionary parties; we will not allow a civil war." One of the workers summarized the opinion of the capital's proletariat in these words: 'To hell with Lenin and Chernov [leader of the Right SRs]. Hang them both!"⁹⁵

With Trotsky's support, Lenin rejected the very idea of a coalition. "If you have a majority," he said to the supporters of a coalition government, "take power in the Central Executive Committee and carry on. But we will go to the sailors." In response Kamenev, Rykov, Milyutin, Zinoviev, and Nogin left the Central Committee, and Rykov, Teodorovich, Milyutin, and Nogin left the Council of People's Commissars, the Sovnarkom. In their declaration, they stressed that the only way to maintain a purely Bolshevik government was through "political terror."⁹⁶

As always, Lenin managed to put down the revolt of his troops through blackmail; he threatened to resign and appeal to the "rank and file." Later, Kamenev and his supporters made a full apology and returned to the bosom of the Central Committee and government. Kamenev, the unrecognized father of future "Eurocommunism," proposed more than once while Lenin was still alive that measures be taken to soften Bolshevik rule. But each time he quickly abandoned his proposals. Historians justly reproach him for his weakness and indecision. But this lack of tenacity in defending his ideas is primarily explained by the fact that Kamenev, in every dispute with Lenin, soon realized that a weakening of Bolshevik rule would threaten the very foundations of the party. The Old Bolshevik Kamenev did not want to change the party's character.

In rejecting all attempts at compromise and all claims by the other socialist parties to even the sightest share of power, Lenin only confirmed what had been stated in Pravda the day after the seizure of the Winter Palace:

We are taking power alone, relying on the country's voice and counting on the friendly support of the European proletariat. But having taken power, we will punish with an iron hand the enemies of the revolution and the saboteurs.... They dreamed of a Kornilov dictatorship.... We will give them the dictatorship of the proletariat.⁹⁷

For Lenin, the dictatorship of the proletariat meant the dictatorship of the Bolshevik party.

Soviet power spread over the country with no serious resistance. Only in Moscow, where Lenin had said victory would be sure and there would be nobody to fight,⁹⁸ did the resistance last for eight days.⁹⁹ In general, local garrisons and armed workers' detachments easily dealt with any at­tempts to stop the Bolsheviks from taking power. The assassination of General Dukhonin, the commander-in-chief at Mogilev, by the Red Guards of the new commander-in-chief, Ensign Krylenko, completed the annihi­lation of the old army.

The consolidation of Soviet power could not be considered complete until the problem of the Constituent Assembly was resolved. The decision to convene the assembly, freely elected by the citizens to determine the future political regime in Russia, had been made by the Provisional Government. "All the best people of Russia," wrote Gorky, "for nearly a hundred years had lived by the idea of a Constituent Assembly."¹⁰⁰ Among the slogans the Bolsheviks had used to campaign against the Provisional Government was the immediate convocation of a Constituent Assembly. They accused the government of preventing the people, "the true master of the Russian soul, from pronouncing its sovereign word." On April 4 Lenin, who had barely arrived in Russia, said with indignation, "I am accused of harboring views in opposition to the quickest possible convening of the Constituent Assembly! I would call these charges delirious raving if decades of political struggle had not taught me to view honesty in an opponent as a rare exception."¹⁰¹

The elections to the Constituent Assembly, the freest elections in the history of Russia, took place after the October revolution. The composition of the assembly (SRs, 40.4 percent; Bolsheviks, 24 percent; Cadets, 4.7 percent; Mensheviks, 2.7 percent)¹⁰² determined the ruling party's attitude toward it, an attitude which was violently negative. Nevertheless, on Jan­uary 5, 1918, the Constituent Assembly met. Bonch-Bruevich, head of the Sovnarkom's administrative service, a friend of Lenin, and head of "Room 75," the embryo of the Soviet repressive agencies, recalls a "humorous conversation" in the halls of the Tauride Palace the day before the first session of the Constituent Assembly. Lenin's laughing reply to a comrade who impatiently insisted on knowing when the Constituent Assembly was finally going to begin its deliberations was this: "Since we made the mistake of promising the world that this talk shop would meet, we have to open it up today, but history has not yet said a word about when we will shut it down."¹⁰³ In order to teach the deputies to the Russian parliament where power lay, Bonch-Bruevich brought a "detachment of the most reliable sailors" to the Tauride Palace—200 sailors, or about one armed sailor for every two deputies, which was ample compensation for the absence of a Bolshevik majority. "I noticed," wrote Bonch-Bruevich, who was in the room with his sailors, "that two of them, surrounded by their comrades, were aiming their guns at Chernov." Bonch-Bruevich persuaded them not to kill the president of the assembly, adding that Lenin would not allow it. "Okay, since the Little Father doesn't want it, but it's too bad," said one sailor, speaking for everyone. At that time the "Little Father," as the sailors affectionately called Lenin, felt that it would be enough to disperse the Constituent Assembly. He gathered the members of the government and

after a quick exchange of opinions, the unanimous conclusion was reached that the talk shop was useless.... It was decided not to interrupt the pro­ceedings, to give them a chance to jabber to their heart's content for a day, but not to allow the next day's session to take place, to announce that the assembly was dissolved, and to urge the deputies to return to their homes.¹⁰⁴

Lenin lost all interest in the Constituent Assembly after it refused to acknowledge the primacy of the Bolshevik government and the decisions of the Soviet Congress. The historic announcement by the sailor Zhelez- nyakov, 'The guard is tired," ended the brief history of the Russian par­liament. The guard's wishes became the fundamental law.

The left SRs, a splinter from the Socialist Revolutionary party, played an important role in the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and the consolidation of Bolshevik power. For a short time after the October rev­olution the Left SRs, led by Maria Spiridonova, Boris Kamkov, and Vladimir Karelin, maintained an attitude of friendly neutrality toward the new seat of authority. In November they entered the government and were given three ministerial posts, which allowed Lenin's government to present itself as a pluralistic one. At the Constituent Assembly the Left SRs blocked with the Bolsheviks.

On the eve of the gathering of the Constituent Assembly, Lenin played the role of judge, jury, and executioner for the first time. Bonch-Bruevich brought him "the first reports of sabotage," compiled by Room 75. Lenin read it all, verified it, checked the sources of the documents, compared handwriting, and arrived at the conclusion "that the sabotage movement really exists, that it is mainly directed from one center, and that this center is the Cadet party." He therefore decided to outlaw the party and brand its members "enemies of the people."¹⁰⁵ A few days later, as president of the Sovnarkom, Lenin signed a decree to that effect. After chasing the Cadets out of the Constituent Assembly with the help of the Left SRs, Lenin was able to dissolve the parliament with little effort. A by-product of the decree outlawing the Cadet party was the murder in a hospital of two of the party's leaders, Shingarev and Kokoshkin, deputies to the Con­stituent Assembly.

After the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, a demonstration took place in Petrograd which encountered the bullets of the Red Guards.

The workers of the Obukhov Factory, the cartridge factory, and other factories took part in the demonstration. Under the red flag of the Russian Social Democratic Labor party, the workers of Vasilevsky Island, Vyborg, and other districts marched to the Tauride Palace. It was exactly these workers who were shot, and for all of Pravdcis lies, it cannot conceal this shameful fact.¹⁰⁶

Gorky wrote this in an article entitled "January 9—January 5," which drew a parallel between the shooting of workers by the tsar's troops on January 9, 1905, and the shooting of workers by the Red Guard on January 5, 1918.

CHAPTER

FROM THE REALM OF

NECESSITY TO THE REALM OF FREEDOM,

1918-1920

THE SHAMEFUL PEACE

Nikolai Berdyaev was wrong in believing that of all tendencies, bolshevism was "the least Utopian and the most realistic," that it best corresponded to the situation existing in Russia in 1917.¹ The Bolsheviks had an easy victory because they promised Utopia: everything for everyone, right away. 'The face of truth is terrible," wrote the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno. 'The people need myths and illusions; they need to be lied to. Truth is frightening, insupportable, deadly." The Bolsheviks offered the illusion of peace, land, and bread. The reality, however, was a new war, forced grain requisitioning, famine, and unprecedented terror.

Shortly before the October revolution, at his retreat in Finland, Lenin put down in writing his plan for transforming Russia. He called his Utopia State and Revolution. He considered this work so important that in a note to Kamenev he requested that if the author were killed the pamphlet be published at all costs. Basing himself on the doctrine of Marx and Engels and taking as a living model the Paris Commune, Lenin outlined the communist state which would emerge after the proletarian revolution. In this state there would no longer be an army or police, all officials would be elected, and the functions of administering the state would be so simple that anyone, even a cook or housekeeper, could learn them. Government officials would earn no more than skilled workers; Lenin gave great importance to this concept. The author of State and Revolution recognized that the victory of the proletariat would not im­mediately give birth to a communist society; a period of transition would be necessary, during which the dictatorship of the proletariat would replace the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. "The proletariat needs the state," Lenin quoted Engels, "not in the interests of freedom, but in order to hold down its adversaries." The dictatorship of the proletariat had two basic functions: to suppress the exploiters' resistance, and to provide leadership for the masses of the population. The first function seemed simple to him, since the repression of an insignificant minority would be the work of the overwhelming majority of the population, the working class. The second function presented no major problems either; people should submit to the "armed vanguard" until everyone could "become accustomed to observing the elementary rules of social intercourse... without coercion, without subordination."²

Immediately upon taking power Lenin ran into harsh reality, which put his Utopia to the test. First of all, the new government had to resolve the war problem, which had been fatal to the Provisional Government. Nego­tiations with Germany began at Brest-Litovsk in December. Prince Max von Baden described in his memoirs some of the peculiarities of these talks. His cousin, Prince Ernst von Hohenlohe, a member of the German delegation, was placed next to a Madame Bitsenko at the dinner table: "She earned this distinction by having murdered a minister." Anastasia Bitsenko had committed this act in 1905. The veteran terrorist represented the Left SRs in the delegation. The encounter at the dinner table between Hohenlohe and Bitsenko, and at the negotiating table between Leon Trotsky and General Hoffmann, was a confrontation between Utopia and reality. The majority of the Bolshevik Central Committee thought that if they simply announced the war was over they could calmly proceed to the building of communism. The Germans demanded reality, that is to say, territory: Po­land, Lithuania, parts of Latvia and Byelorussia.

Bukharin, the spokesman for the Left Communists, an important group­ing within the Central Committee, rejected in principle any compromise with the imperialists and preached a "revolutionary war" against Germany, explaining that it would ignite a "worldwide conflagration." Trotsky pro­posed the celebrated formula, "neither war nor peace," which was supported by the majority of the Central Committee. The Soviet government an­nounced, through Trotsky, that it would withdraw from the war but not sign a peace treaty. Lenin, in the minority, argued the realities of the situation: we have no army, we are helpless, we must sign a treaty. His comrades and disciples had been blinded by Utopia. They failed to understand what was obvious to Lenin: Utopia could not be realized unless power was main­tained. This last argument was Lenin's most important, convincing, and decisive one. When the Germans, taking advantage of Trotsky's announce­ment, began a new offensive and issued an ultimatum, Lenin demanded that it be accepted immediately. He explained, "If the Germans said that they wanted to overthrow Bolshevik power, we would naturally have to fight."³ In other words, power was worth fighting for, but not territory or other such "outmoded" concepts. In discussing Trotsky's refusal to sign the peace treaty, Bonch-Bruevich asks, "How can such a nonsensical at­titude be explained?" He answers:

Generally it has been said that pseudo-patriotic and nationalistic prejudices played bad tricks on the negotiating commission; none of its members, including Trotsky, wanted to take upon himself the woeful responsibility of placing his signature on this humiliating peace treaty, which ignorant loud­mouths might interpret as "betrayal of the homeland," a direct blow to Russia as a state.⁴

Lenin's fanatical self-assurance and belief in his Utopia allowed him to disregard such "pseudo-patriotic and nationalistic prejudices."

On March 3, 1918, the Soviet delegation signed a peace treaty at Brest- Litovsk, "a shameful peace," as Lenin put it, agreeing to German occu­pation of the Baltic states, parts of Byelorussia, and all of the Ukraine. The Soviet Republic agreed to pay an enormous indemnity to the Germans in the form of provisions, raw materials, and gold. But Lenin still held power. "The Brest-Litovsk peace," the Small Soviet Encyclopedia observes, "fulfilled the essential task of preserving the dictatorship of the proletar­iat."⁵

The Left SRs resigned from the government to protest the treaty, but they continued to support the Bolsheviks. Some officers and generals re­fused to recognize the unilateral peace, but the soldiers and peasants were opposed to war. Their support allowed Lenin to stay in power. The shameful peace did not, however, solve any internal problems. All existing conflicts were exacerbated.

On April 8, in a conversation with Lunacharsky, the people's commissar of education, Lenin presented an idea he "had been toying with for some time." In Campanella's City of the Sun the fronts of the houses were covered with frescoes that served to educate and instruct the citizens of that Utopian city. Lenin proposed that Lunacharsky select some slogans for a similar "monumental form of propaganda." Later Lenin picked his favorites from among the suggested slogans. He was especially fond of one: "The golden age is coming; people will live without laws or punishment, doing of their own free will what is good and just." Perhaps these words of Ovid had haunted Lenin as he wrote his State and Revolution. But the golden age did not come after the October revolution. Certainly, men began to live without laws, but nothing they did of their own free will was good or just.

THE SPIRIT OF DESTRUCTION

The first task Lenin assigned to the proletarian revolution was the destruc­tion of the state—the smashing of the old state machinery, in Marxist terminology. This had begun before the revolution, for the army had already fallen apart. After October the judicial system was abolished and replaced by revolutionary tribunals, which railroaded people to prison on the basis of "proletarian conscience and revolutionary duty." Pillaging, looting of wine cellars, and murders were daily occurrences in the revolutionary capital; they found an indignant chronicler in the person of Maxim Gorky. Until the newspaper Novaya zhizn was shut down in July 1918, in a column called "Untimely Thoughts," Gorky constantly and indignantly presented the facts and castigated the people's commissars who, in their efforts to prove their "devotion to the people," did not hesitate to "shoot, assassinate, and arrest those who did not think like them, did not hesitate to lie and slander their enemies."⁶ As an example, Gorky mentioned the case of the sailor Zheleznyakov, who, "translating the ferocious speeches of his leaders into the simple language of a man of the people, said that for the good of the Russian people, it would be all right to kill a million" opponents.⁷ Bonch-Bruevich, who after October 1917 was in charge of security in Petrograd, remembered that "to maintain public order in the city, from the end of October until February 1918, at a time when drunkenness and brawling were at their peak, the only reliable forces we had were the Latvian riflemen at Smolny, some soldiers of the Chasseurs, Preobrazhenzky, and Semenovsky regiments, who were guarding the State Bank, and some units from the Second Fleet."⁸ A few pages later, Bonch-Bruevich tells of his visit to the "loyal sailors" of the Second Fleet. They were commanded by two "politically conscious anarchists," the same Anatoly Zheleznyakov who closed down the Constituent Assembly and who, according to Gorky, was willing to kill a million people, and his brother, an alcoholic and a murderer. Bonch-Bruevich narrates the monstrous exploits of these sailors, "the pride and joy of the Russian revolution," with a bit of fear perhaps, but also with obvious satisfaction at knowing they were on "our side." One of the sailors described how he had put forty-three officers in front of a firing squad.⁹ When the Zheleznyakov brothers began to pillage and kill on a level unheard of even in revolutionary Petrograd, they were disarmed and sent to the front to defend Soviet power. Disarming them required "a strong detachment of Bolshevik Latvians." Also, "just in case, we alerted the Volynsky and Chasseurs regiments, who at that time had distinguished themselves by their sobriety, or rather, their tolerable degree of drunkenness."¹⁰

Clearing the city of anarchists, whether "conscious," "spontaneous," or "pure," did not mean an end to arbitrary justice. The suppression of the enemy took on an organized character. Room 75 was too weak to defend the government, though it had done its best. At a meeting of the Petrograd Soviet, Bonch-Bruevich explained that he had obtained confessions from detainees by threatening to shoot them.¹¹ (The death penalty had been abolished just a few days before.) Room 75 was only the forerunner of the true political police. On December 7, five weeks after the revolution, it was replaced by a new body that became a key instrument of Soviet power, the All-Russia Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle Against Coun­terrevolution and Sabotage—the Cheka. The idea for such an agency had come to Lenin in the aftermath of October. He searched for the right man to head it up: "Is it impossible to find among us a Fouquier-Tinville to tame our wild counterrevolutionaries?"¹² At the beginning of December a man was found who actually did resemble the bloody public prosecutor of the French revolution, whose standard sentence had been the guillotine. At a meeting of the Sovnarkom, this man, Felix Dzerzhinsky, recited his creed: "Do not believe that I seek revolutionary forms of justice. We don't need justice at this point. We are engaged today in hand-to-hand combat, to the death, to the end! I propose, I demand, the organization of revolu­tionary annihilation against all active counterrevolutionaries."¹³

The new organ of "revolutionary annihilation," directly under the au­thority of the Sovnarkom and its president, Lenin, gave priority to the struggle against "sabotage."

From its inception, the new government showed a complete mastery of vocabulary. A new art was born, the art of propaganda, of changing the meaning of things by changing their name. After the proletarian revolution, strikes, the weapon of the proletariat, lost their justification; so they were renamed. When, as we shall see, a general strike of civil servants began, it was denounced as "sabotage," a sinister term implying the need for severe punishment. Power was in the hands of the Bolsheviks, as the nation, and above all the intelligentsia, would learn all too quickly.

Among the ideas of Engels that are still relevant today are these prophetic words: "Nations that have boasted of making a revolution have always discovered on the day after that they had no idea what was happening, that the completed revolution had nothing to do with the one they wanted." In Russia the first to discover this truth "the day after" were the intellectuals. For over a century they had lived for the revolution, longed for it, worked for it. The more the monarchy weakened, the more active they became. As early as the turn of the century they had felt the underground tremors of impending disaster, had hailed the coming onslaught of the "new Huns," had called down fire from heaven, and had agreed to be trampled into the dust for the sake of Russia's regeneration. The February revolution, which brought freedom and lent a voice to the "great silent mass" of the people, at first seemed to be their dream come true. But the people bore little resemblance to the icon worshiped by the intellectuals, who although they controlled the Provisional Government, had no clear idea what to do with their power. Gorky noted in his diary the lament of an anonymous intel­lectual reflecting the sentiments of most of his kind: "I feel terrible, like a Christopher Columbus who has finally reached the shores of America but is disgusted by it."

The intellectuals did, however, find the strength to fight against the "shameless brute" who had violated their beloved. A strike of civil servants and municipal employees broke out first in Petrograd, then in Moscow, and spread to other cities as well. Urban transit systems and power plants shut down. Moscow's teachers went on -strike (for three months), as did those of Petrograd, Ekaterinburg, Astrakhan, and Ufa. Doctors, health workers, nurses, and pharmacists followed suit. University professors refused to recognize the new government. Many technicians also resisted, expressing their ideas mainly through the All-Russia Union of Engineers. One week after the October insurrection, the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets invited the "creative intelligentsia" of Petrograd to a meeting at Smolny. Aside from two Bolsheviks, Rurik Ivnev and Larissa Reissner, only three intellectuals showed up, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vsevolod Mey- erhold, and Alexander Blok. Mayakovsky, who in March 1917 had pro­claimed, "Long live art free of politics," and Meyerhold, director of a spectacular show, The Masked Ball, at the Imperial Alexandrinsky Theater, represented the new revolutionary art.

The hopes of these artistic innovators were described years later by the modernist theatrical director Aleksandr Tairov: "What was our reasoning?

The revolution was destroying the old forms of social life. We would destroy the old forms of art. Consequently, we too were revolutionaries and could march in step with the revolution."¹⁴ These revolutionary artists were sadly mistaken to expect any lasting sympathy from the political revolutionaries. Nevertheless, for a while the new government made use of these "destructive elements." Evgeny Zamyatin described them as "the slippery school of con man art," who "knew when to wear the red cap and when to take it off, when to sing the glories of the tsar and when to sing the hammer and sickle." With the exception of one real poet, Mayakovsky, Zamyatin noted, "the Futurists were the slipperiest of all; without losing one second, they announced that the official artists of the new regime would, of course, be they."¹⁵

At Smolny, Alexander Blok was an alien presence—he who had seen the revolution as Russia's purifying fire, who when he closed his eyes could hear "the music of revolutions." It was also with his eyes closed that he wrote 'The Twelve" and 'The Scythians." He came to his senses rather quickly and with quite a shock: "When the Red Army and socialist con­struction began, I couldn't take it any more," he wrote in his diary.

The disenchantment of the overwhelming majority of the intellectuals did not surprise Lenin; he preached that only the intelligentsia could bring "revolutionary consciousness" to the working class but had always been suspicious and ill disposed toward them. What he did not expect, however, was the disenchantment of the working class, in whose name and for whose sake the revolution had been carried out.

Of the three slogans that had allowed the Bolsheviks to take power, peace and land reflected above all the interests of the peasantry. The third slogan, bread, expressed the interests of the working class but its exact meaning was a good deal less clear. Also unclear was the meaning of "workers' control of production." Moreover, it was symptomatic that the decree on workers' control was not adopted on October 25 along with the other two, but twenty days later, on November 14, 1917.

This decree provided for "workers' control of production, of the purchase, sale, and storage of raw materials and finished products, and of the financial aspects of the enterprise."¹⁶ What could be simpler than this at first glance? The workers would control everything, and all economic problems would be solved by the producers themselves. In January 1918 Lenin encouraged the proletariat: "You are the government, do as you wish, take what you need, we will support you. ... You will make mistakes, but you will learn."¹⁷ This monumental experiment, involving the entire Russian economy, soon has its effect. The workers often interpreted the vague concept of "workers' control" in a very simple way. "I came to the factory and began to put workers' control into effect," a Communist worker related. "I broke open the safe to count the money, but there wasn't any."¹⁸ The organ of the Central Council of Trade Unions, Vestnik truda (Labor herald), complained that the workers regarded "the factories that have been placed in their hands as an inexhaustible ocean from which unlimited quantities of goods can be taken without doing any harm."¹⁹

Governmental measures completely disorganized the functioning of in­dustry. In May 1918 Tomsky, president of the Central Council of Trade Unions, said, "Current labor productivity has dropped to a point that threat­ens us with total disorganization and collapse."²⁰ The decline in labor productivity was one expression of growing discontent among the workers. A. Volsky (Jan Waclaw Machaiski) made this comment in the magazine Rabochaya revolyutsiya (Workers' revolution), whose only issue appeared in June—July 1918: "After the bourgeois revolution of February, workers' wages were substantially increased, and the eight-hour day was won; after the proletarian revolution of October, the workers didn't get anything."²¹ There was another difference between the two revolutions: after the pro­letarian revolution, the working class lost the possibility of fighting for its rights. "Control of production" proved to be a fantasy; the destruction of the management system existing in industry brutally aggravated the workers' plight.

In March 1918 an emergency convention of delegates from local plants and factories was held in Petrograd. It stated:

The unions have lost their independence and no longer serve to organize the defense of workers' rights. The Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies seem to fear the workers. They do not allow new elections, but have en­trenched themselves; they have become government bodies and no longer express the opinions of the working masses.²²

A declaration adopted by delegates from the largest factories in Petrograd and from the railroad workshops, power plants, and printing houses ap­pealed to the All-Russia Congress of Soviets. It summed up the results of the first months of the revolution as follows:

On October 25, 1917, the Bolshevik party, allied with the Left SRs and supported by armed soldiers and sailors, overthrew the Provisional Govern­ment and seized power. We, the workers of Petrograd, have in our majority accepted this change of government, made in our name but without our knowlege or participation. .. . Moreover, the workers have supported the new government, which declared itself a workers' and peasants' government and promised to carry out our wishes and respect our interests. All our organi­zations were placed at its service. Our sons and brothers have shed their blood for it. We have patiently endured famine and adversity. In our name all those whom the new government has designated its enemies have been cruelly repressed. Hoping that the promises it gave would be kept, we resigned ourselves to the eradication of our liberty and our rights. But four months have gone by already, and we see that our trust has been cruelly abused, that our hopes have been brutally stamped out.²³

The delegates' movement, expressing the disenchantment of the working class, began to spread to other cities. In Moscow an organizing committee was established for an All-Russia Conference of Factory Delegates. The movement was labeled Menshevik, Right SR, counterrevolutionary, and broken up.

The workers voted against "proletarian power" with their hands—pro­duction fell off tremendously—and with their feet—they abandoned the disorganized and ruined factories. In May 1918, at the first congress of local economic councils, Aleksei Gastev discussed the workers' refusal to work: "In fact, we are faced with an enormous sabotage in which millions participate. I laugh when I am told of bourgeois sabotage, when the terrified bourgeois is singled out as if he were the saboteur. We are dealing with national, popular, proletarian sabotage."²⁴

The collapse of industry soon had repercussions on agriculture. The Bolshevik party had won the support of the peasants by "borrowing" the agrarian program of the SRs. Lenin did not try to hide this fact: "At least until the summer of 1918, we maintained power because we had the support of the peasantry as a whole."²⁵ In October 1917 the peasants had supported the Bolsheviks, but disenchantment quickly set in. A popular song in the first years of the revolution had this line: "Our engine runs full steam ahead. Last stop is the commune." The Russian peasants didn't want to go that far; they wanted to get off at the first stop, the distribution of the landed estates.

Radical agrarian reform, of which the peasants had dreamed for centuries and the intellectuals for a hundred years, swept the country like wildfire, but with unexpected results. In the overwhelming majority of regions, those who had tilled the soil from time immemorial received on the average half a desyatina, or 1.35 acres, of additional land.²⁶ Workers, artisans, and household servants who had fled the cities also demanded—and received — a plot of land. However, this was not the main reason for the peasants' disillusionment. Each had obtained a bit of land, and the large estates had at last been abolished. Dissatisfaction over the new government began the moment it started demanding agricultural produce from the peasants without providing anything in return. Inflation had stripped money of its value, and industry no longer produced for the countryside's needs. Peasant "sab­otage" was now added to that of the intelligentsia and the proletariat. In November 1917, 641,000 tons of grain were stored; in December 1917 136,000; in January 1918, 46,000; in April 1918, 38,000; in May 1918, 3,000; in June 1918, 2,000.²⁷ The cities were starving. The famished workers further reduced their already low output or simply fled to the countryside.

The Bolshevik government created discontent among those who had supported it. But Lenin's disappointment with the proletariat was just as strong. (He had always been unhappy with the peasantry.) Within a few months after the revolution, the Russian working class, whose "political maturity" Lenin had praised, proved itself in his eyes to be immature, not proletarian enough, and lacking in the training necessary to run the country.

The Utopian dreams of State and Revolution, written on the eve of October, evaporated upon contact with reality. In March 1918 Lenin wrote a new Utopian program, an article called "The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government," in which he spelled out the most important features of "com­munism" (which later came to be called war communism, after its failure became apparent). The "task of suppressing the resistance of the exploit­ers," Lenin wrote, had been fulfilled for the most part. "Now we must administer Russia." This second task was as easy as the first, in the author's view. It could be accomplished simply by establishing "nationwide ac­counting and control of the production and distribution of goods."²⁸ In October 1921 Lenin described his 1918 program more fully:

At the beginning of 1918 we made the mistake of deciding to go over directly to communist production and distribution. We thought that under the surplus food appropriation system the peasants would provide us with the required quantity of grain, which we could distribute among the factories and thus achieve communist production and distribution. I cannot say that we pictured this plan as definitely and clearly as that; but we acted approximately on those lines.²⁹

It was precisely at the beginning of 1918 that Lenin, according to Trotsky, then his closest comrade-in-arms, constantly repeated at Sovnarkom meet­ings: "In six months we will have built socialism." Ten years later, Andrei Platonov would write The Strange Herbs of Chevengur, a novel about some revolutionary dreamers who decide to build socialism "at one blow," using "the fighting methods of revolutionary conscience and compulsory labor service."

Unlike Platonov's characters, Lenin had vast resources at his disposal for realizing his communist Utopia. In industry, "control of production" gave way to nationalizations. Private trade, the foundation of the capitalist system, was banned. And compulsory labor service was introduced. "We ought to begin," Lenin wrote, "by introducing compulsory labor service for the rich."³⁰ Later these principles would gradually be extended to the majority, the workers and peasants. The example of wartime Germany served as confirmation to Lenin that such a scheme could succeed. "German imperialism... displayed its economically advanced position by the fact that it went over, earlier than any of the other warring powers, to a system of compulsory labor service."³¹ Lenin's plan had the simplicity of genius: the Kaiser's Germany plus Soviet power equals communism.

Compulsory service was applied to the peasants in the form of government decrees in May and June 1918 instituting grain requisitioning. Under the so-called surplus food appropriation system (prodrazverstka) peasants were obliged to sell the state all their surplus, at fixed prices. This requisitioning of grain, Lenin said, "must become our fundamental activity" and "must be pursued to the end. Only when this problem is resolved will we have the socialist foundations on which to build the glorious structure of so­cialism."³²

The ban on private trade and the absence of any state trading system brought famine to the cities, an outcome that must have seemed incom­prehensible to a population which had revolted because of food shortages. Lenin formulated his scheme for building the "glorious structure" in the following manner: "There are two ways to fight hunger, a capitalist one and a socialist one. The first consists of free trade. ... Our path is that of the grain monopoly."³³ And so the battle for grain began. In order to confiscate grain, the government organized "food detachments," a measure Lenin described as the "first and most momentous step toward the socialist rev­olution in the countryside."³⁴ Poor peasants' committees were established by decree on June 11, 1918, to help bring the "revolution to the coun­tryside." Part of the grain discovered and confiscated by these committees was to be distributed to the poor peasants themselves, as a "material incentive."

Bonch-Bruevich offers these recollections of the period of "war com­munism":

The onrush of revolutionary events.. . changed our social relations to such an extent that we considered it best to nationalize absolutely everything, from the biggest factories down to the last hairdressing shop run by one hairdresser owning a clipper and two razors, or down to the last carrot in a grocery store. Roadblocks and checkpoints were put up everywhere so that no one could get through with food [smuggled from the countryside]. Everyone was put on government rations.³⁵

Bonch-Bruevich does not explain that the rations varied considerably and that certain categories of the population did not get any at all or that only "speculation by bag traders," who smuggled foodstuffs past the road­blocks, saved the urban population of the Soviet Republic from death. In 1918 and 1919 city dwellers obtained 60 percent of their food from the black market. The grain monopoly and the government's food policy con­tributed greatly to the demoralization of citizens by forcing them to resort to illegal measures, fostering crime on a huge scale and giving birth to an extremely powerful black market. The grain monopoly and the ban on private trade trained people to think that commerce, in and of itself, was a counterrevolutionary activity or at best an unworthy occupation. The grain monopoly, like all the acts of the Soviet government, had not only a concrete goal but also an "educational" function, undermining both the administra­tive structures of the old society and its moral foundations as well.

On January 13, 1918, a decree on the separation of church and state deprived the church of all its property and legal rights, in effect outlawing it. In September a decree on the family and marriage and one on the schools were adopted almost simultaneously. Marriage (only civil marriage was recognized; religious marriage was abolished) and divorce were made freely available. Alexandra Kollontai declared the family's obsolescence, both to the state, because it prevents women from doing work useful to society, and to family members themselves, because the state would gradually take over childbearing.

However, the state could not afford to assume this task immediately after the revolution, although articles were inserted in the legal code making it possible in the future. The government's intentions were made clear at a national educational conference in remarks by Zlata Lilina, Zinoviev's wife and the director of public education in Petrograd, who called for the "na­tionalization" of all children, to remove them from the oppressive influences of their families, because children, "like wax, are highly impressionable" and because "good, true Communists" could be made out of them.

Schools became coeducational, tuition was abolished, and tests were done away with, along with homework. While supporting school reform, the All-Russia Union of Schoolteachers spoke out against the subordination of schools to the state.

The destruction of the prerevolutionary social fabric (the army, the legal system, administration, the family, the church, schools, political parties, the economy) did not frighten Lenin. He was convinced he had the key to building a new world, a pure Utopia, on a bare, newly cleared surface. The key was the dictatorship of the proletariat.

BIRTH OF A DICTATORSHIP

The dictatorship of the proletariat was part of the Russian Social Democratic Labor party's program from its inception. To Lenin, the model for such a dictatorship, as discussed by Marx, was the Paris Commune. In State and Revolution Lenin said that only a complete ignoramus or bourgeois swindler could argue that the workers as a class are incapable of directly admin­istering the state. After taking power, however, he changed his tune. Clemenceau liked to say that war was too serious a matter to be left to the generals. Lenin soon reached the conclusion that dictatorship of the pro­letariat was too serious a matter to be left to the proletariat.

Lenin defined the dictatorship of the proletariat first of all as a system that rejected parliamentarism, with its separation of legislative and exec­utive powers. The dictatorship of the proletariat would fuse the executive and legislative functions.³⁶ This meant that the holders of power could pass laws strengthening their own authority without any checks or balances. Lest there be any misunderstanding, Lenin gave this clear explanation: 'The scientific definition of dictatorship is a power that is not limited by any laws, not bound by any rules, and based directly on force."³⁷

Since the proletariat showed itself incapable of exercising such a dic­tatorship, the vanguard of the working class, the party, had to assume the task. Lenin did not conceal his views: "When we are reproached for ex­ercising the dictatorship of a party... we say, 'Yes, the dictatorship of a party! We stand by it and cannot do without it.'"³⁸ Even before taking power, he had scorned the bourgeois concept of "the will of the majority." "What is needed," he wrote, is "a strength which at the decisive moment and place will crush the enemy's strength."³⁹

Lenin's first contact with the practical reality of power persuaded him of the need for a dictatorship of the party and beyond that—this was a new contribution to Marxism—the dictatorship of a single leader. In March 1918 he justified such a dictatorship by the needs of the modern economy.

Large-scale machine industry—which is precisely the material source, the productive source, the foundation of socialism—calls for absolute and strict unity of will. . . . But how can strict unity of will be ensured? By thousands subordinating their will to the will of one. Given ideal class consciousness and discipline on the part of those participating in the common work, the subordination would be something like the mild leadership of a conductor of an orchestra. It may [also] assume the sharp forms of a dictatorship. ... Be that as it may, unquestioning subordination to a single will is absolutely necessary.⁴⁰

Four months after the revolution, in March 1918, Lenin spoke of the need for a one-person dictatorship for economic reasons. In March 1919, in a eulogy for Yakov Sverdlov, he stressed the need for personal dictatorship for political reasons. "In this time of violent struggle, as we exercise the workers' dictatorship, we must advance the principle of personal authority, the moral authority of one man [like Sverdlov] whose decisions are accepted by everybody without lengthy discussions."⁴¹ Firm authority was a concept Lenin had been attached to for a long time. Trotsky in his pamphlet The Second Congress of the RSDLP: Report of the Siberian Delegation (published in Geneva in 1903) described Lenin's plans.

The state of siege [in the party], on which Lenin insists so energetically, requires the party to have a strong central authority. The practical experience of organized distrust [toward the leadership] requires an iron hand; Lenin makes a mental rollcall of the party's personnel and comes to the conclusion that he and only he has that iron hand.

Lenin did not hide his intentions; Trotsky did not have to guess at them. According to the stenographic record of the Second Congress, when a delegate named Popov referred in his remarks to the omnipresent and all- penetrating spirit of the Central Committee, Lenin raised his fist in the air and called out: 'The fist." The power of the fist, which Lenin had estab­lished within his party, was extended to the country as a whole. Thus was born the twentieth-century "philosophy of power."

Upon discovering that reality did not bear the slightest resemblance to his previous conception, Lenin decided to change it by force, first of all by changing other people's conception of it. It is significant that the first decree of the Council of People's Commissars was a decree on the press putting censorship into effect and outlawing magazines and newspapers guilty of a critical attitude toward the new government. Bonch-Bruevich admits that for some, "even some of the Old Bolsheviks," it was hard to accept the fact that "our old program" from before the revolution had called for "freedom of the press," but after the seizure of power this freedom was immediately abolished. Bonch-Bruevich formulates the "new demands of October" this way: "During a revolution there should be only a revolutionary press and no other."⁴²

A good pupil of Lenin and Stalin, Hitler pointed out that the bourgeoisie's weakness in relation to revolutionary Marxism stemmed primarily from a separation between spirit and force, between ideology and terror. In Marx­ism, said the Fiihrer, "spirit and brute force are harmoniously blended." He added, "National socialism is what Marxism could have become, if it had broken its absurd ties with the democratic order."⁴³ Lenin was the first to discover the secret of blending "spirit and brute force," the practical use of force to carry out a Utopian program, and the use of a Utopian program as camouflage for brute force.

Essential to Lenin's policy, which sought to maintain a minority in power, was splitting the majority, atomizing society.

One of the government's first actions was to wipe out all the ranks, titles, and "social estates" that had existed in old Russia. Unlike the bourgeois revolutions, which had introduced the formal equality of all citizens under the law, the proletarian revolution established inequality as a principle. This was done by the Soviet constitution, adopted in July 1918. One section of the population was completely stripped of its rights. The Russian lan­guage was enriched by the word lishenets, "disfranchised person." The lishentsy were people whose income came from a source other than their own labor: individual tradesmen, religious officials, former police collab­orators, members of the imperial household, but also "persons who hire labor with the aim of extracting a profit." This referred primarily to peasants who hired others, even if this meant one worker in the spring or fall to help work the land. No less than 5 million people fell into this category. Deprivation of rights affected all family members. For the children this meant above all being prohibited from studying at the university level and having only limited access to secondary school, depending on the number of openings. All peasants had their electoral rights curtailed: in elections to the soviets the vote of one worker had the value of five peasant votes.

The peasantry was divided into many categories: rural proletarians, poor peasants, middle peasants, and kulaks. Since there were no specific criteria for determining the category to which any one peasant belonged, arbitrar­iness became the rule. In the system created, the possession of one or two cattle or one or two horses determined one's position in society and the future of one's children. "Social status" became a permanent scar. The revolution forbade social mobility to those individuals whose social origins were undesirable. These could not be changed any more than could racial origins.

A concrete example of "disenfranchisement" was the decision by the Petrograd Commissariat of Food Supply in June 1918 to put into effect a "class-based rationing for the various groups of the working or nonworking population." Initially, four categories were created: (1) industrial workers performing heavy physical labor; (2) all other workers and salaried em­ployees; (3) those in the liberal professions; and (4) nonworking elements.⁴⁴ This decision stemmed from Lenin's orders of December 1917 on "the need to distribute food rations according to a class principle."⁴⁵ On September 27, 1918, Pravda reported: "The Commissariat of Social Security has confirmed the necessity of stripping all kulaks and bourgeois elements, both rural and urban, of their rations. The surplus thus obtained will be used to increase the rations of the rural and urban poor." Having divided society into categories, the government assumed the right to sentence part of the population, the lower castes, to starvation, for the preservation of the upper castes.

An essential instrument of Lenin's policy was the Cheka, which func­tioned in fact as a special organ of the Bolshevik party, directly under Lenin's control. According to Krupskaya, what Lenin feared most of all from the very first days in power was the softness of his own comrades. He was infuriated by a resolution of the Second Congress of Soviets abol­ishing the death penalty, passed on October 25, 1917, on a motion by Kamenev. The February revolution had abolished the death penalty, and when Kerensky attempted to restore it to punish deserters, the Bolsheviks had strenuously objected. Now Lenin angrily repeated: "Nonsense. How can one make a revolution without firing squads?" According to Trotsky, Lenin insisted this was a big mistake, "a pacifist illusion." After the death penalty was abolished, the Bolshevik government, under pressure from Lenin, decided in spite of the decree to "have recourse to a firing squad when it becomes obvious that there is no other way."⁴⁶

A network of "extraordinary commissions" (local Cheka units) covered the entire Soviet Republic. They were set up in major cities, county seats, and provincial capitals, on the railroads, in the ports, and in the army. Very soon the Cheka was granted unlimited power. It was, according to one of its leaders, "an organ that employs in its struggle the methods of investigating commissions, the courts, and the armed forces."⁴⁷ The ex­traordinary commissions themselves made arrests, conducted investiga­tions, held trials, handed down sentences, and carried them out.

On August 30, 1918, in Petrograd, the student Leonid Kanegisser as­sassinated Uritsky, the chairman of the Petrograd Cheka, and in Moscow, the Socialist Revolutionary Fanny Kaplan wounded Lenin. This day marked a turning point in the history of the Cheka. It was ordered to carry out a "merciless mass terror." The Sovnarkom published a decree on September 5 authorizing the Red Terror. That same day Fanny Kaplan was shot without trial by the Cheka.⁴⁸ A wave of executions ensued. 'The number of exe­cuted," said Yakov Peters, deputy chairman of the Cheka, "has been greatly exaggerated. In no way does the total exceed 600. In Peters' view, this was not excessive, since it was in retaliation for the assassination attempt on the party's leader. Grigory Petrovsky, people's commissar of internal affairs, issued a special order expressing indignation "at the insignificant number of serious acts of repression and mass executions of White Guards and bourgeoisie" and requiring that "substantial numbers of hostages be taken."⁵⁰ Dzerzhinsky, chairman of the Cheka, explained in a memorandum what a hostage was: "Hostages must be taken from among... people of high social position, large landowners, factory owners, prominent officials and academics, close relatives of people formerly in power, etc." This was because "nobody will intercede or give anything" for some "rural teacher, forester, miller, or small shopkeeper."⁵¹

The hostage system, unknown in pre revolutionary Russia, was supple­mented by another instrument of repression new to the country—the con­centration camp. The notoriety stemming from its use by Hitler should not obscure the fact that the Soviet state was the initiator of this institution. Trotsky had the honor of being first to use the term. In his order of June 4, 1918, he demanded that all Czechoslovaks who refused to lay down their arms be detained in concentration camps.⁵² On June 26 Trotsky sent a memorandum to the Sovnarkom proposing that all former officers who refused to join the Red Army be considered part of the bourgeoisie and placed in "concentration camps."⁵³ On August 8 Trotsky substantially en­larged the category of those subject to detention and ordered camps estab­lished in Murom, Arzamas, and Sviyazhsk for holding "reactionary agitators, counterrevolutionary officers, saboteurs, parasites, and speculators."⁵⁴ On August 9 Lenin, troubled by the extent of the peasant insurrection in Penza province, sent a telegraph to the Penza Executive Committee urging it to carry out "ruthless mass terror against the kulaks, priests, and White Guards; confine all suspicious elements in a concentration camp outside the city."⁵⁵

The concentration camp became a universal instrument of terror against "suspicious elements." On September 5, 1918, after this method of repres­sion had already been widely employed, it was legalized by a decree of the Sovnarkom: "It is necessary to protect the Soviet Republic from class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps." The next point in this decree states: "All persons implicated in the activities of White Guard organizations, conspiracies, or uprisings are subject to being shot."⁵⁶

As a punitive measure the concentration camp was second in severity to the death penalty, which was restored officially on February 21, 1918, by a decree of the Sovnarkom granting the Cheka the "right to take im­mediate reprisals against active counterrevolutionaries."⁵⁷ This category included "enemy agents, profiteers, marauders, hooligans, counterrevo­lutionary agitators, and German spies." All were to be "shot on the spot," in other words, without investigation or trial.⁵⁸ The Cheka expanded this list, in its "proclamation" of February 22, to include "saboteurs and other parasites." On June 16 the People's Commissariat of Justice informed the revolutionary tribunals that they were not under any "constraints" in se­lecting "the methods of struggle against counterrevolution, sabotage, etc."⁵⁹

The exact number of people shot during the first year of the revolution is unknown. According to Latsis, only twenty-two people were shot by the Cheka during the first half of 1918, but during the second half of that year "more than 6,000 were shot."⁶⁰ Aside from the fact that Latsis's figures are open to question, the number of people shot by agencies other than the Cheka, such as the revolutionary tribunals and local soviets, is not known. It should suffice to note that the official announcement of the execution of "former Tsar Nicholas Romanov" states that on July 16, 1918, the sentence handed down by the Presidium of the Urals Regional Soviet was carried out. It added: 'The wife and son of Nicholas Romanov have been sent to a safe place."⁶¹ In fact, the tsar, his wife, son, and four daughters, a doctor, a cook, a footman, and a maidservant were all shot. If Latsis, the first historian of the Cheka, always counted one when eleven people were shot, his statistics can hardly be considered reliable.

From the very first days of the regime, dictatorship was for Lenin a panacea for all problems, be they political, economic, or social. In 1902, in his notes on Plekhanov's draft program for the RSDRP, Lenin wrote that if the peasants did not adopt the proletarian standpoint, "We will say, under the 'dictatorship': there is no point in wasting words when the use of power is required." After reading this remark, Vera Zasulich wrote in the margin, "Against millions! That's easily said." For Zasulich, a terrorist who had been willing to shoot an official of the autocracy, a dictatorship imposed on millions seemed unthinkable. For Lenin, who was against individual acts of terrorism, mass terror was an indispensable method for building a socialist society. This meant mass terror against the peasants. (A resolution of the Council of Workers' and Peasants' Defense of February 15, 1919, said, "hostages must be taken among the peasantry, so that if the snow is not cleared away, they will be shot."⁶²) It meant mass terror against the workers. (All workers discontented with the new government were declared "nonworkers," not "pure proletarians"; they had been contaminated by the petit bourgeois mentality; meanwhile, the concentration camps were bap­tized "schools of labor. And it meant mass terror against all other classes as well.

In September 1918 all the regional Chekas received the following order from Dzerzhinsky: "In its activities, the Cheka is completely independent; it carries out searches, arrests, and executions, and reports afterward to the Sovnarkom and the Central Executive Committee."⁶⁴ Besides these unlimited powers, the Cheka was granted "infallibility." Criticism was forbidden of "this organ, whose work proceeds under extremely difficult circumstances.

During the first months following the revolution a new state was born, a totalitarian state. It was not so much the severity of its laws as their complete arbitrariness that became their distinguishing feature. The con­stitution had deprived a substantial section of the population of its rights and placed it outside the law. But this was not unique to the Soviet system. In Old Russia certain categories had had limited rights. Even after the reform of 1861 this was true of the peasantry. Jews were also denied many civil rights. But these limitations were defined by law, which also allowed for the possibility of passage from a more restricted "social estate" to another that enjoyed all rights. After the revolution, even the categories that, ac­cording to the constitution, had all rights were in fact deprived of them.

In 1922 Lenin demanded that an article be included in the penal code giving heavy sentences to those who "objectively aid or might aid" the world bourgeoisie. This concept of "objective" (or "unintentional") aid meant that the state, in the person of its leaders, could define or choose whomever it wished as an opponent. And the Cheka would take appropriate measures, against which there was no appeal.

Former tsarist officers became one category of active or potential ene­mies, but when military specialists were needed to help organize the Red Army, they were transferred to the category of "useful citizens." During the summer of 1918, when the civil war was brought to the countryside through the formation of poor peasants⁹ committees, the only useful peasant was the poor one or the agricultural laborer. When evidence showed that this policy tended to unite all the peasantry against Soviet power, the "middle peasant" was added to the category of "useful," and by the end of 1918 the poor peasants⁹ committee were phased out.

In the preface to the Red Book of the Cheka, the situation in postrevo- lutionary Russia was defined in a precise and vivid manner: "The new dictator who had replaced the landowners and the bourgeoisie found himself in splendid isolation as he undertook to build anew."⁶⁶ But this "splendid isolation" had been chosen by the dictator himself.

The isolation of Lenin's party became complete with the resignation of the Left SRs in March 1918. Later, in July, the Left SRs carried out a number of armed actions and were charged with attempting to overthrow the Bolshevik government. "In leaving the government," said the closing argument of the Bolshevik prosecutor, "the Left SR party freed the gov­ernment from a useless burden that was restraining its activities, but it did not pass immediately into the enemy camp."⁶⁷ The Left SRs had walked out of the government to protest the signing of the Brest-Litovsk treaty, but they had remained in the Central Executive Committee and other Soviet institutions, including the Cheka. On July 6, 1918, two Left SRs, Blymkin and Andreev, assassinated German Ambassador Mirbach. Soviet historians interpret that act as a signal for a general Left SR uprising. However, a resolution of the Left SR Central Committee stated that the action was "directed against the current policy of the Sovnarkom and not at all against the Bolsheviks."⁶⁸

The armed "demonstration of discontent" against Bolshevik policy that the Left SRs organized showed that Lenin's power rested on very fragile foundations. A handful of Black Sea sailors who were part of a Cheka detachment commanded by Popov nearly toppled the government. Joachim Vatsetis, a former tsarist army colonel who had crossed over to the Soviet side and who commanded a division of Latvian fusiliers, became the man on whom Lenin's power depended. The situation in Moscow on July 6 closely resembled that in Petrograd on October 25, 1917. Most of the garrison remained neutral, and the outcome was decided by a few armed units. The Latvian rifles (2,750 soldiers) and some students at a military academy (eighty of them) were the only forces that defended Lenin's gov­ernment against the Left SRs, who were not seeking to take power in the first place. The rebellious Popov detachment did not have more than 600 people and had only two batteries.⁶⁹ Vatsetis was instructed to crush the "uprising," whose leaders had gone to the Fifth Congress of Soviets, then in session, to explain their aims. Four commissars were sent to "supervise" Vatsetis, who commanded the only unit capable of fighting. At the Kremlin, where he was to receive instructions, the commander of the Latvian division found a disturbed and frightened Lenin: "He came over to me with short, rapid strides and asked me very quietly: 'Comrade, can we hold out until tomorrow?'"⁷⁰ Lenin understood very well that the "rebel" action was di­rected against him personally.

A few rounds of artillery directed against the Cheka building, where Popov's men had positioned themselves, were enough to discourage the Left SRs, who were only protesting against the treaty with Germany (and against Lenin, who insisted on the treaty). In all other matters they agreed with the Bolsheviks. Blymkin, who later gave himself up to the Cheka in the Ukraine, stressed in his testimony that there had not been an insur­rection and that shots had been fired only as "acts of self-defense by revolutionaries."⁷¹ The verdict of the revolutionary tribunal was a confir­mation of Blymkin's words: twelve men from the Popov detachment were shot by a firing squad, along with Aleksandrovich, a Left SR who had been Dzerzhinsky's deputy and had attempted to use the Cheka to serve his

party's interests. Left SR leaders Maria Spiridonova, Boris Kamkov, Vlad­imir Karelin, and Yuri Sablin were given symbolic prison sentences and later set free. Blumkin was pardoned and given a job with the Cheka.

The events of July 1918 allowed the Bolsheviks to rid themselves of a "burden" (the Left SRs in the government) and showed once more that the Cheka and loyal military units were the key to retaining power. The Left SRs, erstwhile friends and comrades-in-arms of the Bolsheviks, suddenly found themselves tagged with a label that was to become standard practice: "agents of the Russian bourgeoisie and of Anglo-French imperialism."⁷²

UP TO AND INCLUDING INDEPENDENCE

"What is our Russian empire?" asked Andrei Bely in his novel Petersburg. "Our Russian empire," he answered, "is a geographical entity; that is to say, a piece of a well-known planet. And the Russian empire includes, first and foremost, Great Russia, Little Russia, White Russia, and Ru- thenian Russia; secondly, the kingdoms of Georgia, Poland, Kazan, and Astrakhan; thirdly, it includes oh, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera."⁷³ In the 1897 census, the first systematic census in the empire, the population was 122,666,500, of which 44.32 percent were Russian. In short, the Russian state was multinational.

From the time of Peter the Great until the coronation of Alexander III, the nationalities policy of the Russian empire was distinguished by its relative tolerance toward the national traits of the various peoples contained within it. Only the Poles, whose state had been crushed and whose territory had been partitioned by Prussia, Austria, and Russia, continued their fight for national independence. Alexander III introduced a new chauvinistic policy of Russification, which aroused great discontent among the non- Russian peoples, and which Nicholas II continued.

The 1905 constitution allowed the nationalities of the empire to present their demands and express their aspirations, and it soon became evident, at least before 1917, that there were no major separatist tendencies. The inhabitants of the Russian empire wanted reforms, democratization, equal­ity of rights for all citizens, but not the fragmentation of the state. Among the first acts of the Provisional Government was the nullification of tsarist laws restricting the rights of national minorities and the proclamation of full equality for all citizens of the Russian Republic, regardless of religion, race, or national origin.⁷⁴ The foundations were also laid for local self-rule. The governors of Transcaucasia and Turkestan were replaced by special committees, consisting mainly of Duma deputies who were natives of those

regions. Administration of the southwestern provinces was placed in the hands of Ukrainians, and in the summer of 1917 the Ukraine was recognized as a separate administrative unit.

In 1917 nationalist movements developed with unexpected vigor, fed by the same sources as other revolutionary movements. There was a difference, though. In the "borderlands" the peasant discontent caused by the post­ponement of agrarian reform was not directed against the landowners but against the Russian settlers; it took on a nationalist, anti-Russian character.

The October revolution hastened the decomposition of the empire; even the peoples that a short time before had not even dreamed of autonomy began to demand independence. The Soviet government recognized full independence for Poland. This did not require very much effort, since Poland had been occupied by the Germans and the Provisional Government had already promised it independence. Independence was likewise granted to Finland. However, People's Commissar of Nationalities Stalin, speaking at the congress of the Social Democratic party of Finland on November 14, 1917, called on the Finnish Bolsheviks to take power, adding: "And if you require our help, we will give it to you, fraternally extending our hand to you. You can be sure of that."⁷⁵ In January 1918, when the local Bolsheviks in Finland attempted to take power, Soviet troops stationed there at the time did indeed aid the insurgents.

Before coming to power, Lenin often referred to Poland, Finland, and the Ukraine as nations whose right to independence was being frustrated by the Provisional Government. In June 1917 he expressed indignation at the Provisional Government's refusal to carry out its "elementary democratic duty" to declare itself in favor of autonomy for the Ukraine and its right to secede freely. After October his attitude on this issue changed. The Ukrainian nationalist movement had assumed vast dimensions after the February revolution. One of its leaders, professor Mikhail Hrushevsky, whose History of the Ukraine provided a historical and literary basis for the movement, declared in March 1917: 'There is no longer a Ukrainian problem. There is the great and free Ukrainian people, who are creating their own future under new conditions of liberty."⁷⁶ Hrushevsky was elected president of the Central Rada, which represented the revolutionary parties and national minorities.

Gradually the Rada became the highest expression of the will of the Ukrainian people. On June 13 it published its first universal declaration. "Henceforth," it stated, "the Ukraine will be the Ukrainian People's Re­public. Without seceding from the Russian republic, without endangering its unity, we shall take a firm stand upon our land, so that we can help all of Russia with all our strength, so that the entire Russian republic can become a federation of free and equal peoples." This document also de­lineated the boundaries of the new republic: 'The territory of the Ukrainian People's Republic includes all territories inhabited by a majority of Ukrain­ians."⁷⁷

The Bolsheviks, who had criticized the Provisional Government for being slow to grant Ukrainian demands for independence, were themselves op­posed to independence for the Ukraine. Yuri Pyatakov, head of the Ukrain­ian Bolsheviks, said after the universal declaration was published, "We should not support the Ukrainians, because their movement bodes no good for the proletariat. Russia cannot exist without the Ukrainian sugar industry; the same can be said about coal (the Donets basin), wheat, and so forth."⁷⁸ But the Bolsheviks' weakness in the Ukraine (in August 1917 they had 22,303 members there, with 15,818 in the Donbass, Kharkov, and Eka- terinoslav)⁷⁹ forced them to ally with the Rada as the Provisional Govern­ment. On the eve of the October revolution, the Rada supported the Bolsheviks, believing that they were even weaker than the Provisional Government. In Kiev their combined efforts put an end to the power of the Provisional Government on October 29. Soon after the victory, these mo­mentary allies came into conflict. The Rada refused to recognize the all- Bolshevik Sovnarkom as the legitimate government of Russia and demanded that it be replaced by a more representative socialist body. On December 4 the Soviet government issued an ultimatum to the Rada: while recognizing the right of the Ukraine to independence, it demanded that the soviets and Soviet power in the Ukraine be recognized, or else there would be war.

Two days before the ultimatum, the Soviet government had issued the Declaration of Rights of the Peoples of Russia, which solemnly proclaimed: (1) the equality and sovereignty of all peoples; (2) the right of nations to self-determination, up to and including separation and the formation of nation-states; (3) the liquidation of all national and national-religious priv­ileges and restrictions; (4) the free development of national minorities and ethnic groups inhabiting the territory of Russia.⁸⁰

A congress of soviets, convened in Kiev, gave a majority to the supporters of the Rada. The Bolsheviks walked out and organized their own congress in Kharkov. The central executive committee elected in Kharkov declared itself the sole legal government of the Ukraine and sent a telegram to Moscow announcing its total subordination to the Soviet government. On December 12 the Bolsheviks in Kharkov expelled all other socialist parties from the central executive committee and became the sole ruling party. War with the Rada began. In January 1918 units of the Red Guard occupied Kiev.

The nationalist movement in Byelorussia was in an embryonic stage in 1917. The Byelorussian peasants did not display any awareness of their ethnic differences from the Russians. Political life in Byelorussia centered around the Russian and Jewish socialist organizations. In March a Bye­lorussian National Committee consisting of representatives of all ethnic groups and social classes was founded. It called for autonomy and federation with Russia. Gradually a Byelorussian socialist party, the Gromada, became the main force in the committee. In July a Byelorussian rada was created on the Ukrainian model. At the same time Bolshevik influence grew, es­pecially among the soldiers, who were impatiently waiting for peace to come. The Gromada refused to accept the October revolution and in De­cember convened a Byelorussian national congress, which on the night of December 17 declared Byelorussia independent.

As for the 16 million Muslims inhabiting the Russian empire, their First All-Russia Congress began in Moscow on May 1, 1917, attended by about a thousand delegates. The congress passed a resolution granting equal rights to women, in a break from longstanding Islamic tradition. It also assumed the right of religious self-determination, the right to select the religious leader of Russia's Muslims, the mufti, who was previously ap­pointed by the tsar. The national question provoked a heated debate. A group of delegates, headed by Volga Tatars, advocated the preservation of a unitary Russian state with national-cultural autonomy. The Azerbaijani delegation, supported by the Bashkirs and Crimean Tatars, demanded a federation and territorial self-rule for all peoples. By a majority vote, the congress passed a federalist resolution. On July 21 a second congress met in Kazan and decided, in view of the weakening of the central government, to begin organizing autonomous Muslin cultural institutions without delay. On November 20 a national assembly met in Ufa and elected three min­isters—for religion, education, and finance. Their task was to take concrete steps to assert the cultural and national autonomy of all Muslims in Russia.

By October 1917, then, the Muslims of Russia had laid the foundations for their own religious and cultural administration. Events during the next few months, however, broke all links between the various Muslim regions, and each group went its own way in trying to cope with the problem of incipient civil war.

A political party of the Kazakhs and Kirghiz, the so-called Alash-Orda, was founded in the summer of 1917 at a congress in Orenburg. Its goal was the unification of all the nomadic tribes of the steppes into an auton­omous "Kirghiz state." The Bashkir delegates in the First All-Russia Mus­lim Congress had also demanded autonomy. But after the congress rejected their demand for a Greater Bashkiria, which would have united all the Tatars and Bashkirs of the Ural and Volga regions, as well as their demand for a Lesser Bashkiria, which would have included only the territories inhabited by Bashkirs, they walked out of the congress. They then attended the Orenburg meeting, opting for territorial autonomy together with the Turkic tribes of the steppe lands and Turkestan. During the spring and fall of 1917 there were frequent clashes between Muslins and Russian settlers. In September the Provisional Government declared martial law in the entire Semirechie region in Central Asia, to stop interracial strife.

In December, the Bashkirs, Kazakhs, and Kirghiz declared their auton­omy in Orenburg and established relations with the Cossacks of that region. Thus an anti-Bolshevik movement was created, led by Dutov, the ataman of the Orenburg Cossacks, and supported by Muslim political leaders.

The Bolshevik forces in the steppes of Kirghizia and Kazakhstan were insignificant. "In October 1917 there were fewer than thirty Bolsheviks in Ashkhabad, and in Kazakhstan there were about a hundred. In Verny, there was no Bolshevik organization at all before the October revolution. Until mid-1918 only a few isolated groups of pro-Bolshevik soldiers and workers functioned in certain towns of Kirghizia."⁸¹ Bolshevik slogans found support among the soldiers, the railworkers, and the settlers. These elements saw the dictatorship of the proletariat as a Russian dictatorship. Since the Bolsheviks proclaimed a power of the soviets of workers, soldiers, and peasants, and since there were no workers, soldiers, or peasants among the Kazakhs and Kirghiz, the Muslim tribesmen also perceived Bolshevik power as Russian power.

The political movement in Turkestan was composed of a conservative religious current and a liberal, pro-Western one. Initially enemies, they drew closer toward the end of 1917 because they both called for autonomy, which the Russian government refused to grant. The Muslim socialist move­ment, close to the Left SRs, was much less influential, but it played a decisive role in the October events. In Turkestan, as in the rest of Central Asia, the Bolsheviks could be counted on one hand. On October 25 rail- workers opened fire on a Cossack club in Tashkent. Within two days the soviet, controlled by the Bolsheviks and supported by the Left SRs, had taken over the city. On November 15 the Third Regional Congress of Soviets met and proclaimed the victory of Soviet power throughout Turkestan. The congress rejected Muslim demands for autonomy, since it might weaken Russia's authority, and declared itself against Muslim participation in the Soviet government in Central Asia. According to the resolution, this was because of the "uncertain" attitude of the local population toward the soviet and because the native population had no proletarian organizations, which the Bolsheviks would have welcomed into the government.⁸²

The Crimean Tatar National party, founded in July 1917, came into conflict almost immediately with the Provisional Government because the government refused to place Muslim schools under Tatar control or to allow the formation of an exclusively Tatar military unit. The main strength of the Bolshevik organization in the Crimea, established in June 1917, was in Sevastopol. The Left SRs and Mensheviks held a majority in the Sevastopol Soviet, which condemned the October seizure of power. The first conference of Crimean Bolsheviks did likewise. A delegation of Baltic sailors sent to Sevastopol by the Bolshevik Central Committee soon straightened out the situation. The Bolsheviks loyal to Lenin walked out of the soviet and created a revolutionary committee (revkom), which organized a massacre of Black Sea naval officers, dispersed the soviet, and had its Menshevik and Left SR leaders shot. Tatar nationalists convened a constituent assembly, the Kurultai, in Bakhchisarai, which proclaimed itself the sole legal authority in matters concerning Crimean Tatars. The Kurultai adopted a constitution based on Western democratic models and installed a national directory, which functioned as a de facto Tatar government of the Crimea and refused to recognize the legitimacy of Bolshevik power.

In 1916 the population of the Caucasus region was approximately 12 million, including 4 million Russians, Ukrainians, and Byelorussians, nearly 2.5 million Azerbaijanis, less than 2 million Armenians and about the same number of Georgians, and 1.5 million "mountain peoples," as the ethnically variegated native inhabitants of the Caucasus Mountains were called.⁸³

The three main political parties in Transcaucasia—the Azerbaijani Muslim Democratic party (Mussavat), the Armenian Federation (Dashnaktsutiun), and the Georgian Social Democratic party (the Georgian Mensheviks)— had all been founded before World War I. All three supported the Provisional Government after the February revolution, favored autonomy within the framework of a Russian federation, and enjoyed mass support from their respective national constituencies.

The October revolution, the first signs of decomposition in the Russian Army of the Caucasus, and Turkish advances into Transcaucasia began to change the situation. On November 11 the Mussavat, Dashnaktsutsiun, and Georgian Mensheviks established their own local provisional govern­ment, the Transcaucasian Commissariat, whose purpose was to maintain order in the region until the All-Russia Constituent Assembly elected a government for the Russian state as a whole. After the Constituent Assembly dissolved by the Bolsheviks, the Transcaucasian delegates returned to their home region and organized a legislative body, the Transcaucasian Seim (or Diet). Lacking influence among the masses, the Bolsheviks directed their propaganda at the soldiers. In the elections for the Constituent Assembly in the Transcaucasian region the Bolsheviks received only 4.6 percent of the vote.⁸⁴ Even in Baku, their stronghold in the region, roughly 80 percent of the Bolshevik vote came from the soldiers. The Bolsheviks tried to use their support among the soldiers to take power in Tiflis in November 1917, but Georgian workers thwarted the attempt.

In April 1918 the Turks, who had taken Batum and Kars, issued an ultimatum to Transcaucasia: it would be occupied unless it declared its independence. On April 22 the Transcaucasian Federation, which included the ruling Mensheviks of Georgia, the Dashnak government of Armenia, and the Azerbaijani Mussavat, proclaimed the independence of the Trans­caucasian Federal Republic.⁸⁵

On the western borders of the old Russian empire, independent states were formed with no difficulty, since these territories were under German occupation. In December 1917 Finland, Lithuania, and Latvia proclaimed their independence. In February 1918 Estonia did the same.

By the beginning of 1918 the Russian state had disintegrated. The developing civil war was a contest not only between the supporters of different political and social systems but also between advocates of differing national conceptions about the future state. Both the Reds and the Whites fought for unification of the Russian state, but each side presented its version of this same program differently.

The Bolshevik program on the national question was authentically Marxist in the sense that it embraced two mutually contradictory principles: the self-determination of nations, and the centralized state. Lenin favored a centralized party and extended the centralist principle to the state. For him, the nationalities problem was above all a problem of political power. He considered the national minorities of the Russian empire his allies in the struggle for power. In 1915 he glorified treason: "Whoever argues against treason and against the disintegration of the Russian state... has adopted the bourgeois, and not the proletarian standpoint."⁸⁶ From October 25, 1917, he championed and defended a strong, centralized state, seeing it as "a tremendous historical step forward... toward the future socialist unity of the whole world."⁸⁷

Lenin's wish for a strong, centralized state was inspired not by patriotism but by his desire for a powerful weapon in the fight for world revolution, which was for him the principal purpose of the October revolution. This is why Lenin's policies had a "dialectical" character. In his telegram to the Congress of Soviets of Tashkent, he wrote, 'The Council of People's Com­missars will support autonomy for your region based on Soviet principles."⁸⁸ Lenin was for independence, on the condition that it was subordinated to "Moscow's point of view," that is, the views of the Central Committee.

Lenin was forced to fight against those Bolsheviks who did not understand the subtleties of the party's nationalities policy. Pyatakov, Dzerzhinsky, and Bukharin argued that the proletarian revolution was going to eliminate social classes and would likewise put an end to the very concept of nations. They demanded that all references to independence and autonomy be abandoned, on the grounds that these were bourgeois categories. The people's commissar of nationalities, Stalin, was, like Lenin, a strong defender of centralized power. In May 1918 Stalin formulated his commissariat's policy, explaining that Soviet power would recognize autonomy as long as it was under Mos­cow's leadership and control. Autonomy was not granted to the nation but to the working class and the toiling peasantry, and only if they supported Soviet power.⁸⁹

Lenin opposed the "national nihilism" of some of his comrades because of tactical considerations, understanding better than anyone the strong appeal of "self-determination" as a slogan.

When Confucius was asked how he would rule, the wise man answered: I would start by giving words their true meaning. As Lenin began his rule the first thing he did was to strip words of their meaning. He would give them meanings depending on the need of the moment and modify them depending on the audience. The Bolshevik party entered the civil war with a program defending the right of nations to self-determination "up to and including independence," while at the same time insisting that "the prin­ciple of self-determination must be an instrument in the struggle for so­cialism and must be subordinated to the principles of socialism."⁹⁰

REDS AND WHITES

The October revolution, which was supposed to bring peace to Russia, plunged it instead into a civil war of the most terrible kind. The first volleys were fired in the south of Russia, in the Cossack regions. In February 1917 the Cossacks had refused to support the tsarist regime; until then they had been regarded as its strongest bulwark. They had likewise refused to support the Provisional Government, declaring their neutrality toward the Bolshevik seizure of power.

Of the two main Bolshevik slogans, peace and land, the Cossacks un­questionably supported the first; they wanted to go home. On the question of land, they differed radically from the rest of the Russian peasants. They wanted, not more land, but the preservation of what they had. It was the traditional privilege of a Cossack male to be granted thirty desyatinas, about eighty acres, of land in exchange for military service until age thirty- six. At the turn of the century the Don Cossack region, the largest of the eleven Cossack territories (all located in the outlying parts of the empire), had a population of 1,022,086 Cossacks and 1,200,669 non-Cossacks.⁹¹ Sverdlov announced that the most important task of Soviet policy was to divide the Russian villages into two enemy camps, to turn the poorest peasants against the "kulak elements." Only if we can split the countryside, he said, will we obtain the same results in the villages that we have in the cities.⁹² These attempts to foster divisions were not successful, and the government was forced to abandon them by dissolving the poor peasants⁹ committees at the end of 1918, six months after they had been formed. In the Cossack regions the campaign to turn non-Cossacks against Cossacks resulted in fierce hostilities between them.

The enemies of the revolution converged on the Don region, hoping for support from the Cossacks. But the Cossaks did not want the restoration of the monarchy. They wanted simply to take advantage of the revolution to obtain greater autonomy, while preserving their privileges. General Alek- seev, the last chief of staff of the tsarist army, did not find the help or the support he was hoping for on the Don.

Alekseev's plan was to organize a "volunteer army" to fight the Soviet government. His work went slowly. His army grew from about 300 in November 1917 to approximately 3,000 in January 1918, staffed mainly by former officers, officer cadets, and private school students. Alekseev and General Kornilov, the de facto commander of the Volunteer Army, had high hopes for a great influx of volunteers, especially from among former officers (of which there had been 133,000 in May 1917). Their hopes were in vain. The officers did not wish, any more than the soldiers, to keep on fighting; they considered the war over. General Kaledin, ataman of the Don Cossacks, declared on January 29, 1918: "Our situation is hopeless. Not only does the population not support us; it is hostile to us." He committed suicide the same day.

Red forces, 10,000 strong, led by Rudolf Sivers, had entered Don Cos­sack territory in mid-January. By January 23 Rostov—the region's main city—was taken. The Volunteer Army, burdened with wagon trains full of politicians, journalists, professors, and wives of officers and soldiers, fled into the steppes. There began what was known as the Icy March. Each soldier of the Volunteer Army had only a few hundred cartridges, and for each of its eight artillery pieces there were 600—700 shells. Through severe difficulties, surrounded on all sides by the enemy, the Volunteer Army reached the Kuban region, hoping to find what it had not found on the Don. On April 17, at Ekaterinodar, General Kornilov was killed in battle. His death was an irreparable loss for the future White Army. General Denikin assumed command. He abandoned the siege of Ekaterinodar and led the army back to the Stavropol region, between the Don and the Kuban, from whence the Icy March had begun. During those eighty days of constant combat, from January to April, the situation had changed radically in southern Russia. The Germans had occupied the Ukraine, and the Don Cossacks had abandoned their neutrality. The establishment of Soviet power had been accompanied by mass executions. Under Sivers' orders, all cap­tured "volunteers" had been executed, and there were many executions for other reasons. For example, General Renenkampf was shot for refusing to serve in the Red Army. The church was persecuted, and a draconian system of grain requisitioning was put into effect. On April 10, 1918, the Cossacks rebelled. General Krasnov was elected ataman, and he organized the Army of the Don.

Another center of struggle against Soviet power arose in the east. Thou­sands of Czechoslovak prisoners of war were being transported by train to Vladivostok to be shipped to France to join the war against Germany and Austria. On May 17, 1918, they revolted and took Chelyabinsk. Moscow ordered all soviets from Penza to Omsk to disarm the members of the so- called Czech Legion, but the legionnaires rejected the demand. On May 25, the Czechs took Mariinsk and by June 8 they held Novonikolaevsk (now Novosibirsk), Penza, Syzran, Petropavlovsk, Kurgan, Omsk, and Sa­mara.⁹³

During World War I the Czechs and Slovaks had refused to defend the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and had surrendered to the Russians en masse. By the end of the war there were close to 200,000 Czechoslovak prisoners in Russia. The Czech Legion had reached the strength of 50,000 soldiers and officers. Under the terms of the Brest-Litovsk treaty, the Soviet gov­ernment was required to disarm the legion. The Czechs gave up some of their arms but hid the rest.

The Czech revolt gave a powerful impetus to the anti-Bolshevik movement east of the Volga. On August 6 Kazan fell. The Czechoslovaks needed only to cross the Volga and the road to Moscow would have been open to them. For the first time since the October revolution, the Soviet government was threatened by a truly dangerous foe. The creation of a regular army became a necessity. Until then, scattered uprisings by disparate opponents of the Bolshevik party in the borderlands of the old Russian empire had been crushed by semiguerrilla Red Guard detachments and units of the Red Army still affected by a revolutionary zeal which did not readily accept authority. The forces of the Cheka had sufficed to crush a number of peasant revolts. The Soviet newspapers of spring 1918 are full of information about this.⁹⁴ The extent of repression can be judged from documents published by the Soviet authorities concerning the executions that followed the crushing of the July 1918 uprising in Yaroslavl. After the city was retaken "fifty- seven people were shot on the spot." Then a "special investigating com­mission" subjected hundreds of people to "an exhaustive interrogation" after which it was "discovered" that 350 people "were the ringleaders of the conspiracy and had had relations with the Czechoslovaks." The entire "gang of 350" was shot "by order of the commission." Ten more were executed after a further investigation conducted by the Cheka of Yaroslavl. The Red Book of the Cheka gives a very candid account of the suppression of the Yaroslavl insurrection, which lasted from April 6 to April 21. Latsis relates that 106 of the conspirators, and an armored division that went over to their side with two armored cars, held off the assaults of the First Soviet Regiment of the International Detachment and a Left SR unit for a long time. The suppression of the Left SRs in Moscow, it should be noted, did not stop them from supporting the Soviet side in Yaroslavl. After an artillery barrage, with an armored train from Moscow taking part, "a large part of the city was consumed in flames." Then the city was subjected to air bombardment with "bombs of the highest destructive power." The following ultimatum was presented to the besieged city: all its inhabitants must leave or "it would be subjected to a merciless hurricane of fire by heavy artillery, and also chemical shells."⁹⁵ Such methods of warfare were not successful when the well-trained and disciplined Czechoslovak troops appeared, how­ever.

The Central Executive Committee proclaimed the republic in danger. Trotsky, appointed people's commissar of war, took on the task of creating a regular army. Earlier than the other party leaders, including Lenin, Trotsky understood that dreams of "the people in arms" or of the army being replaced by the militia were nothing but Utopia. He based the new army on two principles: the employment of military specialists, and terror. It was obvious that an army could not function without professionals and equally obvious that the officers of the tsarist army had no desire to serve the Bolsheviks. Trotsky ordered the mobilization of former officers and NCOs. Refusal to join the army meant internment in a concentration camp; in addition, the families of officers were taken hostage. Fear had an im­portant role in Trotsky's theoretical system. "Intimidation," he wrote, "is a powerful [instrument] of policy, both internationally and internally. War, like revolution, is founded upon intimidation. A victorious war, generally speaking, destroys only an insignificant part of the conquered army, intim­idating the remainder and breaking their will. The revolution works in the same way: it kills individuals, and intimidates thousands."⁹⁶ Trotsky's terms individuals and thousands were merely figures of speech: in reality it was a matter of millions and tens of millions. Nevertheless this passage can be accepted as a clear statement of the concept of terror on which the Soviet Republic was founded. It was necessary to kill some in order to shatter the will of the rest.

After the fall of Kazan, Trotsky left for the front and signed an order with the following warning: no mercy for the enemies of the people, the agents of imperialism, or the lackeys of the bourgeoisie. He warned that in the train of the people's commissar of war, where the order was drafted, there was a standing revolutionary tribunal with full powers and that in Murom, Arzamas, and Sviyazhsk, concentration camps had been set up. Having reached Sviyazhsk, on the west bank of the Volga across from Kazan, Trotsky reorganized the Fifth Army. Showing his fist of steel, he ordered the commander and the commissar of a regiment shot because they had retreated without orders. The execution of the commander did not produce any commentary; that of the commissar (a man named Panteleev) was a real sacrilege in the eyes of the Communists because one of their own had been shot. The incident was discussed throughout the civil war; later it was used to demonstrate Trotsky's "Bonapartist aims."

Trotsky's pitiless feat yielded the desired results. On September 10 Kazan was retaken. By the beginning of October all of the Volga region was in the hands of the Red Army, which at this point numbered more than half a million men. By the end of the year, the figure had passed one million. The army's character also changed. Commanders were no longer elected, they were appointed. Soldiers and commanders took an oath written by Trotsky. It began, "I, a son of the working people," and ended, "If I violate this oath, may the merciless hand of revolutionary law punish me." The creation of this mass professional army took place under the slogan of world peace. 'The objectives of socialism," wrote Trotsky in the preface to his plan for the creation of the army, "is total disarmament, perpetual peace, and fraternal collaboration among all of the earth's people's."⁹⁷

A mass professional army could not function, much less fight, without military specialists. Trotsky created a revolutionary army with the same officers who the day before had been denounced as enemies of the revo­lution. Only a small number of officers and generals willingly served the Soviet government. One of the first to join the Red Army was General Mikhail Bonch-Bruevich, who had commanded the Northern Front and was the brother of Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, the administrator of the Council of People's Commissars. Trotsky gave him the task of organizing a general staff. General N. M. Potapov, who had crossed over to the Bolshevik side even before the October revolution, was appointed second in command of the army and put in charge of Field Headquarters, the Stavka.⁹⁸

The overwhelming majority of officers were mobilized and forced to serve the Soviet regime. Trotsky's policy of using military specialists ran into stubborn resistance from other Bolshevik leaders. He had to confront a coalition led by Lashevich, head of the military section of the Central Committee; Zinoviev, president of the Northern Commune and boss of Petrograd; and Stalin, representative of the Central Committee on the South­ern Front. Trotsky's adversaries did not question the principle of using military specialists; they stressed that they should be employed only as "aides de camp" and, when they were no longer needed, "thrown away like a squeezed lemon."⁹⁹ General Novitsky, who had volunteered to join the Red Army, protested in an open letter to Trotsky. Trotsky replied with assurances that officers "who work conscientiously in the present difficult conditions deserve respect."¹⁰⁰ Lenin was leaning toward Trotsky's adver­saries. In March 1919 he advised the commissar of war to purge the army of old officers and to name Lashevich commander-in-chief. He was ex­tremely surprised to hear that over 30,000 officers were serving in the Red Army and that it would not be able to survive without them.¹⁰¹ A realist, Lenin at once grasped the correctness of Trotsky's policy and publicly expressed his enthusiasm for this original method of building socialism with bricks from the old regime. Even General Denikin praised the clev­erness of the Soviet policy.¹⁰²

Trotsky made massive use of military specialists, placing them under the constant surveillance of political commissars. "For the first time, the commissar came onto the scene in the role of Soviet enforcer."¹⁰³ Every command by an officer had to bear the commissar's signature. The com­missars had the right to demote the unit's "commander" (the officer in charge, in the vocabulary of 1918) or even to arrest him. With his char­acteristic pomposity Trotsky declared that the commissars were the "new Communist order of samurai, in which the members have no caste privi­leges, know how to die, and teach others how to die for the cause of the working class."¹⁰⁴ The commissars might die and teach others to die, but their main task was to act as "the eyes of the proletariat," controlling the military specialists and, in a sense, "conquering the elements," riding the whirlwind of revolution. Like the samurai, however, the commissar must above all be loyal.

The German occupation of the Ukraine enabled the White generals to form major military units. By mid-1918 the most important anti-Bolshevik force was General Krasnov's Army of the Don. The White Cossacks took Novocherkassk and after that abandoned their interest in Moscow and Russia. Their main wish was to subdue the local non-Cossack population. By the summer of 1918 the Volunteer Army had between 8,000 and 9,000 soldiers. The two anti-Bolshevik armies were caught up in constant political and strategic disputes. While Krasnov launched an offensive against Tsar- itsyn, Denikin began a second campaign in the Kuban. In the fall of 1918 Denikin defeated the Eleventh Army of the Northern Caucasus, at the same time that the Red Army was victorious on the eastern front. In January 1919 the Don Cossacks abandoned their siege of Tsaritsyn. Denikin ordered a mobilization of all officers under forty in the territories occupied by the Volunteer Army. The White Army became stronger, but it was no longer a volunteer army, and it lost its homogeneity. On January 8, 1919, after an agreement with the atamans of the Don and Kuban Cossacks, General Denikin became commander-in-chief of all the armed forces in the south of Russia. For the first time an army with a national objective, liberating the country from Bolshevik power, was created.

The metaphor so widely used by Soviet historians (the counterrevolution as a "ring of fire") is not an accurate description of the civil war. The fire that broke out the day after the October revolution blazed everywhere in the country, to one degree or another. The universal dissatisfaction with Lenin's policies developed into major bonfires, however, only in the south­ern, northern, eastern, and western outlands, and these did not merge into one general anti-Bolshevik conflagration because they lacked a single leader and a single unifying idea.

The fact that the main centers of counterrevolutionary strength were on the periphery gave the Soviet government major strategical advantages. "Our central position," wrote Trotsky, "made it possible for us to act along internal operational lines and reduce our strategy to one simple idea: the consecutive liquidation of fronts depending on their relative importance."¹⁰⁵ The course of military operations in 1919 was convincing proof of the advantages the Soviet government derived from its central position, con­trolling the main rail lines and junctions.

In the summer of 1919 several focal points of anti-Bolshevik strength appeared in the eastern part of Russia. In the Volga region a Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly (the Komuch) established its sway, the SRs being the moving spirit in this formation. After the taking of Ekaterinburg by the Czechs, a Urals Regional Government was formed. Likewise, a so-called Siberian Government made Omsk its capital. Or­enburg Province was under the rule of the Cossack Ataman Dutov, who professed formal loyalty to the Komuch but in fact acted independently. Disputes and conflicts arose between these governments because of their differing, often diametrically opposed views on fundamental questions: what attitude to take toward the revolution and the changes it had made and toward the peasants and the workers, and what kind of structure to advocate for the future Russian state. Robert Bruce Lockhart, a British agent in

Russia, recalled a letter he received from General Alekseev in the summer of 1918. The right-wing general stated that he would rather collaborate with Lenin and Trotsky than with Savinkov and Kerensky.¹⁰⁶ Similar sen­timents were expressed by members of the Siberian Government, who were obliged to collaborate with SRs from the Komuch. In September a confer­ence at Ufa established a directorate whose aim was to provide overall leadership for all anti-Bolshevik forces in the east of Russia. A council of ministers was chosen, with the army and navy portfolios going to Admiral Kolchak. On November 18, 1918, the SR members of the directorate were arrested, and Admiral Kolchak was named "supreme ruler." He proclaimed himself "commander-in-chief of all the land and sea forces of Russia."

In March 1919 Kolchak launched a drive toward the Volga along a broad front. The Red Army, weakened by the transfer of its best units to the south, could not hold its ground. By the end of April, however, the com­mander of the Soviet eastern front, a former colonel of the tsarist General Staff, Sergei S. Kamenev, inflicted a stunning defeat on Kolchak's army, driving it back to the Urals and pursuing it into Siberia. No sooner had Kolchak's army begun to retreat than Denikin launched an offensive from the south. His troops took the Ukraine, then Kursk, Voronezh, and Orel, after which they directly threatened Moscow by way of Tula. At the same time, independently of Denikin, General Yudenich started a drive against Petrograd from the Baltic region. Trotsky was sent to Petrograd to cope with the emergency and in a few days organized a successful defense of the city. At the end of October Yudenich's army retreated in disorder. The commissar of war warned the Baltic republics that the Red Army would march on them if they did not disarm Yudenich. He threatened Finland in similar fashion, vowing to send his Bashkir divisions against Helsinki if necessary. Meanwhile the Red Army defeated Denikin north of Orel and soon drove him south to the Black Sea. At the end of 1919 the victory of the Red Army on all fronts was assured.

General Denikin, in his Sketches of the Russian Turmoil (Ocherki russkoi smuty), spoke with blunt honesty about the causes of the White defeat. He cited the moral decomposition of the army, the looting and pogroms, which corrupted officers and soldiers alike and undermined discipline. But that was not the main problem. Denikin noted with perplexity that after his troops had liberated an immense territory, "we expected all elements hostile to the Soviet government to rise up. But there was no uprising."¹⁰⁷ The commander of the White Army correctly reduced the entire problem of the civil war to what he called "one question": Are the mass of the people sick of Bolshevism and will they rally to our side?¹⁰⁸ These were really two separate questions. To the first the answer was yes; to the second, no.

The main reason for the defeat of the counterrevolution in Russia was that its leaders failed to understand the political essence of a civil war. The revolution was led by people with political experience, but the coun­terrevolution was led by soldiers who had never concerned themselves with political and social questions. In mid-May 1918 Denikin and Alekseev drafted a program entitled 'The Objectives of the Army," which said that the Volunteer Army was fighting to save Russia by (1) forming a strong, disciplined, patriotic army; (2) waging a war to the death against bolshevism; and (3) restoring order and unity to the country. On December 4 the con­stitution of the Volunteer Army was published. It recognized the laws in effect on Russian territory before October 25, 1917; that is, it recognized the February revolution, and it guaranteed freedom of religion, the press, and assembly and the inviolability of private property. On November 18, 1918, Admiral Kolchak declared in his first appeal to the population that his main aim was "the creation of an effective army, the defeat of bolshe­vism, and the establishment of law and order so that the people can freely choose the form of government they desire and put into effect the great ideas of liberty that are now being proclaimed throughout the world."¹⁰⁹

The primary objective of both Denikin and Kolchak was to create an effective fighting force. Their other objectives were vague and ill defined. The lack of a clear-cut program left an opening for the Red propagandists to attribute whatever they wished to the White generals.

The prime objective in a civil war must be to win the support of the population. The Bolsheviks came to power because they promised peace and land. The first promise was not kept, but the blame for that was laid on the counterrevolution. As for the land, it remained in the peasants⁹ hands, although the "surplus food appropriation system" subjected whatever the peasants grew to confiscation. Life became much harder, especially in the cities. Hunger, cold, and terror reigned. Nevertheless the new govern­ment kept one of its promises: the old ruling classes lost all their privileges. Not only did they live worse than before; they lived worse than the pro­letariat. Although the workers did not have any material satisfaction, at least they had a psychological one. The promise voiced in the workers' hymn, the Internationale, "We have been naught; we shall be all," was realized in inverted form: those that had been all became naught. This was a verifiable, undeniable accomplishment of the October revolution.

Popular support for the government at that time depended on two key questions: the future of the nationalities inhabiting the former Russian empire, and the future of the land that the peasants had taken. The Whites openly proclaimed their goal of restoring "Russia one and indivisible." Their Russian nationalism clashed with the irresistible growth of local nationalism in the outlying regions of the Russian state, the same regions in which the anti-Bolshevik forces were concentrated. The Bolshevik party concealed its true centralizing aims beneath the slogan of self-determina- tion. (Thus it came out ahead in the competition for popular support on the national question.)

The programs of the White governments dealt with the land question in an ambiguous way. The clause in the constitution of the Volunteer Army referring to the "inviolability of property" could be interpreted as a repu­diation of the agrarian reform. On territory occupied by the Whites the land was frequently returned to the large landowners. On Soviet territory, peasant discontent was aroused by government requisitions and the for­mation of state farms and communes on former estate land, which the peasants thought should be divided up among themselves. A wave of peasant revolts in the Ukraine in 1919 was the direct result of a decree placing "all the large, cultivated holdings formerly belonging to the big landowners" in government hands so that state farms could be organized.¹¹⁰ Such decrees reflected the government's Utopian goal of creating "grain, meat, milk, and fodder factories that would emancipate the socialist system economically from [dependence on] the small proprietor."¹¹¹ Despite such grievances, when the peasants compared them to the White policy of returning the land to the former landlords, the Bolshevik government came out the lesser evil. The population viewed the White program as a return to the past. The program of the revolution seemed to promise hope. For the majority an unknown future was preferable to the discredited past.

The revolution had a single leader whose authority was recognized by all revolutionaries, and this was one of its greatest assets. The leaders of the Soviet government quarreled among themselves no less than the White leaders and there were no fewer animosities among the members of the Revolutionary Military Council and the Red generals than among the White generals. To the clashes of ambition common to all armies and all wars was added a special rivalry, between the political and the military leaders of the Red Army. "The constant and unending dissension and quarreling among the political leaders about the so-called question of command do us great harm," wrote Commander-in-Chief Vatsetis to Lenin in January 1919. "Some party members, overcome with ambition, seek to occupy high positions of command despite their lack of military training for such duties and their total inability to function successfully as commanders."¹¹² As chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, president of the Council of Labor and Defense, and head of the party, Lenin had unlimited power and unchallenged authority, which allowed him to act as the final arbiter in all disputes. To maintain a balance between hostile groups, Lenin would often support one side against the other for a while, then reverse himself and support the side he had opposed. In July 1919, for example, over Trotsky's objections, Lenin had Vatsetis removed as commander-in-chief, replacing him with Sergei Kamenev. To console Trotsky, Lenin gave him a blank piece of paper with his signature as chairman of the Council of People's Commissars at the bottom, approving in advance any order the commissar of war might issue.¹¹³ The White movement had neither an uncontested leader like Lenin nor an astute strategist who knew how to maneuver, as he did, in the political shoals of civil war without losing sight of the main objective.

Another decisive factor in the Bolshevik victory was terror. Ghastly episodes of White terror are known from many accounts. But terror in the White-occupied areas was always a matter of individual acts by sadistic or fanatical generals, such as Mai-Maevsky or Slashchov. The Red Terror was sponsored by the state. It was not directed against individuals or even political parties but against entire social groups, entire classes, and in some phases of the civil war against the majority of the population. The intimidation that Trotsky viewed as a powerful instrument of policy, both internationally and domestically, was applied on a scale of which the Whites had no idea. It was in the civil war that Stalin first revealed his talents. "Be assured that our hand will not tremble," he wrote to Lenin, who had sent him as a special emissary to Tsaritsyn and telegraphed him to be "ruthless."¹¹⁴ Stalin immediately passed Lenin's message along to Shau- myan in Baku: "We must be especially ruthless toward the bandits in Dagestan and elsewhere who are preventing trains from moving through the Northern Caucasus; a certain number of auls [mountaineers' settlements] must be burned to the ground to teach them not to attack trains in the future."¹¹⁵

On January 24, 1919, the Organizational Bureau (Orgburo) of the Bol­shevik Central Committee stated that, "in view of the experience with the Cossacks in the civil war," the only correct procedure was "to wage the most ruthless possible war against all the Cossack upper elements, exter­minating them to the last man." The Orgburo document called for "total extermination" of the wealthy Cossacks and "ruthless mass terror against all Cossacks who have taken part directly or indirectly in the struggle against the Soviet government."¹¹⁶ The suppression of the Don Cossack revolt of the spring and summer of 1919 took the form of genocide. One historian has estimated that approximately 70 percent of the Don Cossacks were physically eliminated.¹¹⁷

This deliberate and systematic terror, embracing the entire population, was also applied in the army. After destroying the old army and beginning

to build another "on new foundations," the Bolsheviks soon returned to the conception of a regular standing army, but this time with a discipline more rigorous than the tsarist troops had known. "In the Red Army," Vatsetis wrote to Lenin,

discipline is based on harsh punishments, particularly executions.... Through these punishments and executions we have struck terror in the hearts of everyone, soldiers, commanders, and commissars alike. ... The death pen­alty ... is utilized so often at the front, for all possible reasons and on all possible occasions, that the discipline of the Red Army could be called sanguinary in the full sense of the word.¹¹⁸

Vatsetis was wrong in assuming that Lenin did not know what discipline was like in the Red Army. The chairman of the Council of People's Com­missars explicitly discussed Red Army discipline on October 17, 1921: "Strict, stern measures were adopted, including capital punishment, mea­sures that even the former government did not apply. Philistines wrote and howled, The Bolsheviks have introduced capital punishment,' Our reply is, 'Yes, we have introduced it, and have done so deliberately.'"¹¹⁹

Terror and the promise of Utopia."I am a simple man, you know," the chairman of the Cheka in Poltava confessed to the old Russian writer Vladimir Korolenko. "To tell you the truth, I haven't read anything about communism. But I know what it's about—that there shouldn't be any money. And you see, there isn't any money in Russia anymore. ... Every worker gets a card telling how many hours he's worked. ... He needs a coat. He goes to a store and hands in his card. They give him a coat worth so many hours work. ... Nowadays," the Cheka official admitted, "we're obliged to commit many cruelties. But after we triumph.. ."¹²° The conversation took place on July 10, 1919.

This mixture of Utopian promises and ruthless mass terror produced an explosive compound enabling the Bolshevik party to blast its way to victory in the civil war. A crucial factor in this process was the presence of a leader who knew how much of each component to put into the mix, de­pending on the needs of the moment.

FOREIGN INTERVENTION

The intervention of foreign powers in the Russian civil war did not sub­stantially alter the balance of forces in that war. Soviet historians have made much of Winston Churchill's reference to a "campaign by fourteen

nations." Churchill, one of the few Western leaders who advocated inter­vention, mistook his wish for reality.

In the years 1918—1920 there was not one general intervention in Russia but a number of unrelated campaigns, whose objectives varied or, some­times, remained totally unclear. For the intervening powers the interests of Russia were always secondary, and few among them understood what was going on in postrevolutionary Russia.

The first phase of intervention, from the summer of 1918 to November of that year, was for the Allies simply part of the war against Germany. After the February revolution, the countries of the Entente feared a separate peace between Germany and Russia. Their fears were justified; if the Provisional Government had withdrawn from the war, its outcome might have been quite different. The German army, transferred to the western front before the arrival of the Americans, might have won the second Battle of the Marne.

The Allies began to plan an intervention in Russia immediately after the October revolution. They had no doubt that the revolution was the work of the Germans because the benefits to Germany were so obvious. The struggle against bolshevism was seen as an extension of the struggle against Ger­many.

Before making peace with Germany, the Soviet government maintained contact with the Allies. In early 1918, when the port of Murmansk was threatened by a German—Finnish offensive, Trotsky, who had just been named people's commissar of war, ordered the Murmansk Soviet to collab­orate with Allied troops. In March the British landed 2,000 men. After the signing of the Brest-Litovsk treaty the Germans demanded that the Soviet government order the evacuation of Allied troops from Murmansk. Germany regarded their presence as a casus belli. The Allies' refusal to comply and the landing of additional troops—with the agreement of the Murmansk Soviet—gave the Bolshevik government a pretext to initiate military action against the "interventionists." The fighting began on June 28. This area in the north of Russia remained under Allied control until the fall of 1919, when it was evacuated.

The successful German offensive on the Eastern Front in March 1918 increased the Allies' concern. They were afraid that German troops might quickly extend their control as far as the Urals. In London on March 16, 1918, the Supreme Allied War Council adopted Clemenceau's proposal to land Japanese troops in Russia's Far Eastern region. The first Japanese units reached Vladivostok on April 5. In August American troops arrived. By the end of September 1918 the Allied expeditionary corps in the Far

Eastern region had 44,000 men: 28,000 Japanese, 7,500 American, 1,000 Canadians, 2,000 Italians, 1,500 British, and 1,000 French. The number of Japanese troops was increased to 75,000. They occupied several rail centers along the Amur River and the Sino-Russian border, reaching the shores of Lake Baikal. The other Allied troops remained in Vladivostok.

The Czech Legion, formally under Allied command, was the only foreign military unit that regularly took part in operations against the Red Army. After Kolchak's coup in November 1918, the Czechoslovaks ceased their military activities and concentrated on trying to find a way out of Russia. On January 15, 1920, to improve their bargaining position, they turned Kolchak over to the Political Center, an SR-dominated body which had assumed power in Irkutsk. A week later, the Center transferred power to a Bolshevik revolutionary military committee. On February 7, 1920, Ad­miral Kolchak was shot by a firing squad.

The main arena of British intervention was the Caucasus and Transcau­casia. In August 1918, invited by the Transcaucasian government, the British entered Baku, but they were soon forced to retreat under pressure from Turkish forces, which had also entered the region. Meanwhile, in the Trans-Caspian territory the rail workers of Ashkhabad, enraged by local commissar Frolov's bloody reign of terror, overthrew Bolshevik rule on July 13, 1918. A locomotive engineer named Funtikov became head of the Trans-Caspian Government, the only government in revolutionary Russia actually composed of workers. None of the ministers in this government had more than a high school education except the minister of foreign affairs, a teacher named Zimin. Funtikov's government asked the British for aid. In response, General Malleson sent 2,000 troops from Baluchistan, who helped occupy the rail line from Ashkhabad through Merv to Krasnovodsk on the Caspian.

After the capitulation of Turkey, Austria-Hungary, and Germany in October and November 1918, the Allied forces in Russia openly proclaimed their anti-Bolshevik (not merely anti-German) aims. As before, however, they were unable to develop a unified strategy. Frequently the various Allied powers pursued contradictory policies. France and England, for example, expressed a desire to help General Denikin but at the same time supported nationalist movements in the Ukraine and the Caucasus opposed by De­nikin. In May 1919 the Allied Supreme Council promised aid to Admiral Kolchak on the condition that "the Allied Governments will have proofs that they are really helping the Russian people to achieve freedom, self- government, and peace." The Allies demanded that Kolchak convene a Constituent Assembly, restore a republic rather than a monarchy, and guar­antee independence for Poland and Finland and autonomy for the Baltic states, the Caucasus, and the Trans-Caspian territory. Meanwhile, one of the Allied powers, Japan, refused to aid Kolchak and supported, instead, its own prot6g6s, the Cossack atamans Semenov and Kalmykov.

Churchill, British war minister, strongly supported intervention, while Lloyd George, British premier, repeatedly sought to come to terms with the Soviet government. The British military representatives inside Russia op­posed the policies of both ministers and were, in turn, condemned by British public opinion. French policy was equally hesitant and ambivalent. Besides all this, the Allied powers competed with one another in pursuit of spheres of influence on Russian territory, each placing its own self- interest above the common cause.

The fighting capacity of the Allied troops sent to Russia was extremely low. Having survived the terrible battles of the world war, they did not wish to die in a strange land. Antimilitarist sentiment spread throughout Europe and, especially in the defeated countries, contributed to revolutionary out­breaks—in Germany, Austria, and Hungary in particular. Bolshevik slo­gans fell on fertile ground in France, Britain, and the United States as well.

Fears that the Allied troops in Russia might become demoralized and refuse to fight contributed to their evacuation. On September 27, 1919, the Allies withdrew from Murmansk and Arkhangelsk. The evacuation of Siberia began at about the same time. Only the Japanese remained, hoping to keep their bases in the Russian Far East. In August 1919 the British completed their withdrawal from Central Asia. They left the Caucasus at the same time, except for Batum, which they held until March 1921. (Under the Brest-Litovsk treaty, it was supposed to be returned to Turkey.) From Batum they watched the Red Army invade Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Ar­menia, areas the British had evacuated on the grounds that "the situation in the Caucasian republics had been stabilized." French intervention was equally ineffective. On December 17 and 18, 1918, a French naval squad­ron landed units of the French Eastern Army in Odessa, approximately 45,000 strong. They occupied areas around Tiraspol, Nikolaev, and Kher­son. After four months of idleness they were hastily evacuated on April 5 and 6, 1919.

The nations of the Entente gave the White armies substantial aid in the form of money, arms, and supplies. However, the presence of foreign troops on the territory of the former Russian empire in support of those who advocated a "Russia one and indivisible" gave a formidable weapon to the Soviet propagandists. It allowed the Bolsheviks to pose as defenders of the country's national interests.

In fact, the number of foreigners fighting on the side of the Red Army greatly exceeded the number of foreign "interventionists." Until the fall of 1918, Latvian, Polish, Chinese, Czech, and Finnish "internationalists," who as a rule were experienced soldiers, constituted the main fighting forces of the growing Red Army. In the fall of 1918 their number exceeded 50,000. By the summer of 1920, the international units numbered nearly 250,000.¹²¹ The international units were among the most self-sacrificing of the Red forces; their members were inspired by the concept that their only land was the land of the soviets. The foreigners who served in the Red Army were called internationalists, rather than interventionists, to suggest that they were the incarnation of a progressive idea and conse­quently had the historical right to fight alongside the Bolsheviks. This form of intervention was euphemistically called "fraternal aid in building a new world."

"GIVE US WARSAW"

In a history of the civil war the Polish—Soviet war of 1920 requires separate consideration. Soviet historians nevertheless continue to describe it as "the third campaign of the Entente" against the Soviet Republic.

Adam Mickiewicz, the Polish national poet, told of a prophetic vision in which he saw an independent Poland reborn out of the collapse of the three empires which had partitioned his land. The prophecy came true in 1917—1918: however the resurrected nation soon came into conflict with the hereditary enemy on its eastern border. Clashes between Polish and Soviet troops began in early 1919, in areas of the Ukraine, Byelorussia, and Lithuania. In August 1919 the Polish army took advantage of the weakness of the Soviet forces engaged on the fronts of the civil war to establish a battle line extending from Vilna through Minsk to Lvov. Secret negotiations then began between the governments of Lenin and Pilsudski.

The first meeting between Moscow's envoy, the Polish Communist Julian Marchlewski, and Warsaw's representatives took place on October 11, the day that Denikin's army reached Orel, its point of farthest advance toward Moscow. The White forces took Orel on October 13. Pilsudski's represen­tative told Marchlewski that the Poles were not interested in helping Denikin and therefore had not attacked Mozyr. Such an attack, coinciding with Denikin's offensive at Orel, could have shattered the entire southern front of the Red Army. As conditions for an armistice, Pilsudski proposed rec­ognition of the existing battle line as the Polish—Soviet border, an end to Communist agitation in the Polish army, and an end to Soviet military operations against Petlyura.¹²² With the exception of the last point, Lenin agreed. But on December 14 Marchlewski returned to Moscow and the talks were broken off. By then Orel had been retaken by the Red Army, Moscow was no longer threatened, and Denikin was in retreat.

Jozef Pilsudski, who assumed the leadership of the Polish state in No­vember 1918, had for many years been a socialist, but as he put it, he got off the socialist train at the stop marked "independence." The leaders of the White armies were strong advocates of a "Russia one and indivisible," and did nothing to calm Polish fears about their future in the event of victory. In June 1919 Kolchak deeply offended the Poles by announcing that, after his victory, a Constituent Assembly would reexamine the question of the border with Poland. Denikin's attitude was the same as Kolchak's. Pilsudski's hope was that a Soviet Russia would be weaker than a republican Russia. His strategic aim was to establish a federation including Poland, Byelorussia, Lithuania, and the Ukraine, which would support all break­away tendencies in the former Russian empire, from Finland to the Cau­casus, thus solidifying a buffer region between Poland and Russia.

Lenin believed that the spark of the Russian revolution would ignite the fire of world revolution. In his view, conflict with Poland, a potential "Red bridge" to the West, was inevitable. None of the Bolsheviks doubted the necessity of "forcing the Polish bridge"; the only question was when and how to do it. Trotsky, who had said, 'The road to London and Paris goes through Calcutta," declared at the end of 1919: "When we have finished off Denikin, we will throw all the strength of our reserves against the Polish front."¹²³ Poland interested the Soviet government less for its own sake than as a means of breaking through to Europe, above all to Germany.

Pilsudski decided to strike first. On April 17, 1920, he ordered an offensive against Kiev. On April 21 he signed a treaty with Petlyura, recognizing his directorate as the supreme authority in the Ukrainian Peo­ple's Republic and proclaiming the total independence of the Ukraine.

Kiev fell on May 7. The Soviet troops, aware of their weakness, withdrew without offering any serious resistance. It proved easier to conquer the Ukraine, however, than to govern it. The Poles, who wished to appear as liberators, were regarded as invaders. The Ukrainians did not want the kind of independence that was imposed from abroad. Petlyura proved in­capable of establishing any stable political structures.

On June 12 the Soviet army, strengthened by fresh reserves, reoccupied Kiev. The speed of Poland's initial victory was now matched by the speed of its defeat. Pilsudski's armies withdrew in haste to the boundaries of ethnographic Poland.

The Polish invasion gave rise to a new political phenomenon in the Soviet Republic, a burst of government-sanctioned patriotism. Patriotism, which

Lenin had denounced at the beginning of the world war as a bourgeois concept and which after the revolution was persecuted and ridiculed, sud­denly became part of the Communist party arsenal. On April 29 the party's Central Committee appealed not only to the workers and peasants but to "the respected citizens of Russia" to defend the Soviet Republic. This marked the resurrection of a concept of Russia that had been discredited by the revolution. The Central Committee referred to age-old enmities between Poland and Russia and recalled earlier invasions of Russia, in 1612, 1812, and 1914. It expressed certainty that "the respected citizens" would not allow the Polish "pans" (landlords) to impose their will on the Russian people. The Ukrainian Communists, who for three years had fought ruthlessly against Ukrainian nationalism, called on the Ukrainian people as a whole to rise up in defense of their homeland.

The appeal to Russian patriotic feeling produced immediate results. General Brusilov, former commander of tsarist armies in the world war, published a statement in Pravda calling on his fellow generals and officers to forget their grievances and do their patriotic duty—defend their beloved Russia from the foreign yoke, even at the cost of their lives.

This excess of patriotism disturbed the Soviet leaders, and measures were taken to curb it. The newspapers published a spate of articles em­phasizing the class character of the Polish—Soviet war. Trotsky temporarily closed down the magazine of the General Staff, which had carried an article contrasting "the inherent Jesuitism of the lyakhs" (an insulting term for Poles) to "the honest and open souls of the Great Russians."¹²⁴

Karl Radek discovered a formula which was typical of the way dialectics is used to reconcile the irreconcilable. "Since Russia is the only country where the working class has taken power, from now on the workers of the world must become Russian patriots."¹²⁵

A concrete result of this use of patriotic slogans was a successful mo­bilization of former officers and NCOs. By August 15, 1920, there were 314,180 of them in the Red Army.¹²⁶

After the Polish withdrawal from Kiev, the Soviet Republic concentrated the bulk of its forces on a single front and made ready, for the first time in its history, to invade another country. In command of the offensive was Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a twenty-seven-year-old former tsarist officer. All the army commanders under him—Kork, Lazarevich, Sologub, and Ser- geev—had been colonels in the tsarist army.

The question of whether to cross the Polish border was discussed in the Politburo. The opinions of the Polish Communists, the "experts," were divided. Karl Radek warned of the dangers of such an action, which he said most Poles would perceive above all as an invasion by Russians. The majority of the Polish Communist leaders, however, warmly supported the plan to Communize Poland with the help of the Red Army. Most importantly, Lenin was resolutely in favor of invasion.

On Lenin's insistence the Politburo voted to invade and rejected an armistice proposal from British Foreign Minister Curzon, although Trotsky supported it. For Lenin, the fact that in March 1920 a general strike in Germany had foiled a right-wing attempt to seize power (the Kapp putsch) was irrefutable proof that the German working class was ready for revolution. By crossing Poland the Red Army would be able to lend a fraternal hand to the German proletariat. The miracle of the October revolution would be repeated as the miracle of the world revolution. Tukhachevsky, in his marching orders for the western front signed on July 2, proclaimed: "On our bayonets we will bring peace and happiness to toiling humanity. For­ward, to the West!"

On July 23 a Provisional Polish Revolutionary Committee (the Polrevkom) was organized in Moscow, with Marchlewski as titular head. Its real leader was Dzerzhinsky. The Polrevkom was the first attempt to use foreign Com­munists living in Moscow to staff a Soviet government that would be installed beyond the borders of the Soviet Republic. Experience in this field was still lacking, and the activities of the Polrevkom were improvised following the Moscow model. Stalin, however, foresaw that the Polish experiment could be repeated. On June 16 he wrote Lenin a letter presenting theoretical arguments for a proposed confederation of such future Soviet states as Poland, Germany, and Hungary. These populations, he argued, could not be treated like Bashkirs or Ukrainians and simply included in a federation of Soviet republics.¹²⁷

Bialystok, the first major Polish city to be taken, fell on July 28. The Red Army offensive rolled on, even though negotiations between Polish and Soviet representatives were proceeding in a desultory way and despite the fact that the last of the White armies, the army of Wrangel, had begun military operations aimed at breaking out of confinement on the Crimean peninsula. Lenin swept aside the fears of Central Committee members who suggested a halt in the Polish offensive in order to deal with Wrangel. Lenin knew that the Whites and the Poles would not coordinate their actions. During the negotiations with Marchlewski, Pilsudski's personal represen­tative had stated clearly that it was central to Pilsudski's policy "not to allow the Russian reactionaries to triumph in Russia."¹²⁸ Wrangel by him­self did not pose a serious danger.

On August 6 Tukhachevsky was named commander of the entire Polish front, combining the western and southwestern fronts. On August 14 Trotsky signed an order that ended: "Red armies, forward. Onward, heroes. On to

Warsaw!"¹²⁹ Soviet troops were expected to enter Warsaw on August 16. Along with the war cry, "Give us Warsaw," another now was heard: "Give us Berlin!" By mid-August Gai's cavalry corps was only ten days' march from Berlin. The delegates to the Second Congress of the Comintern, held in Moscow July 19 to August 7, could follow the progress of the Red Army on the map hanging at the front of the hall. The world revolution was coming to Europe on the points of swords and bayonets. Lenin was categorical in his conversations with the French delegates: "Yes, Soviet troops are in Warsaw. Soon Germany will be ours. We will reconquer Hungary. The Balkans will rise against capitalism. Italy will tremble. Bourgeois Europe is cracking at all its seams in this storm!"¹³⁰

At the end of the congress, on August 7, small red flags surrounded Warsaw on the map. But the Soviet offensive was stopped on the outskirts of Warsaw. After its stunning defeat on the banks of the Vistula, the Red Army was forced into a rapid retreat.

The two sides in the war, and many military historians since then, have meticulously analyzed the military operations in search of the causes for the Red Army's success and defeat. Trotsky and Tukhachevsky charged that defeat was the result of Stalin's behavior. They said that Stalin, a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the southwestern front, had disobeyed orders. Stalin later blamed the "traitors" Trotsky and Tuk­hachevsky.

On a military level, the causes of the Red Army's defeat are evident: insufficient coordination of the two fronts, "underestimation of the enemy's forces, and overestimation of our own troops' successes."¹³¹ On the political level, things are even clearer: Lenin repeated Pilsudski's mistake. Pilsudski had imagined it was possible to bring independence to another nation on the point of a bayonet. Lenin was convinced that communism could be implanted the same way. But as a Soviet historian has put it, 'The Polish bourgeoisie and Catholic clergy succeeded in contaminating the minds of the Polish peasants and small handicraft producers, as well as some of the workers, with the poison of bourgeois nationalism."¹³² The Soviet com- mander-in-chief, Sergei Kamenev, commented that the Red Army had reached out its hand to the Polish proletariat but "did not find that pro­letariat's hand reaching out in response. Undoubtedly, the more powerful hand of the Polish bourgeoisie held that hand down and kept it deeply, deeply hidden."¹³³

Great Britain and France had done their best to stop the initial Polish invasion of Russia. By granting Poland modest assistance in the form of money and arms, they exerted pressure for an armistice.¹³⁴ After January 1920 the Entente's policy in regard to Russia was based mainly on Lloyd

George's views. While rejecting the Soviet system, as all other Allied leaders did, Lloyd George strongly opposed intervention in Russia's affairs, con­sidering it a waste of time and money. On April 16, 1919, he declared he would rather see a Bolshevik Russia than a bankrupt Great Britain.

Lloyd George formulated the principles of a policy that was to become standard for the West vis-&-vis the Soviet Union: to smother bolshevism with generosity. He declared that trade with the Soviet Republic would allow Russia's economy to revive, put an end to its chaotic state, and help surmount the difficulties that had given rise to bolshevism. When Lev Kamenev arrived in London on August 4, 1920, to hold talks with the British, "he was given such a courteous reception by Lloyd George that it would not have been any better had he been sent by the bloodthirsty tsar and not by Russian proletarian democracy."¹³⁵ Lloyd George was hoping to persuade the Soviet representative to accept peace on the basis of the Curzon line (the roughly ethnographic eastern frontier of Poland proposed at the Versailles peace conference in 1919). Unable to obtain any conces­sions from Moscow, which expected Warsaw to fall at any time, he set out to tame the Poles. An inter-Allied mission headed by British diplomat Lord D'Abernon left for Poland. France was represented by Ambassador Jus- serand and General Weygand. British diplomat Maurice Hankey, a member of the mission who left Warsaw after six days of talks, announced in his report that Poland could not be saved. He suggested that "suitable con­ditions" be obtained for Poland through a peace agreement and that Allied efforts be concentrated on trying to improve relations with Germany and, through it, with Russia.¹³⁶ When Lloyd George, seeking to learn the real intentions of the French government, told Marshal Foch that Great Britain was ready to send its troops to Poland if France would do so as well, the marshal answered bluntly: "There aren't any troops."¹³⁷

General Weygand, refuting the legend that he was the "father of the victory" on the Vistula, wrote in his memoirs: 'The victory was Polish, the plan was Polish, the army was Polish."¹³⁸

The Riga peace treaty, signed on March 18, 1921, was satisfactory to both parties. The Poles obtained a border much farther east than the one proposed by Curzon in July. The Soviet government, fearing worse condi­tions, was forced to accept the proposal. The Allies were particularly pleased. With Poland's help and at little cost to themselves the Bolshevik advance into Europe had been stopped.

In his diary Lord D'Abernon quoted Gibbon's historical observation that if Charles Martel had not stopped the Moors at Сгёсу, the Koran would have been taught at Oxford. D'Abernon added: "It is possible that the battle of Warsaw saved Central Europe and part of Western Europe from a more perfidious danger: the fanatical tyranny of the Soviets."¹³⁹ Historians today might modify this remark: the Polish victory on the Vistula postponed the Marxism-Leninism requirement in Eastern European schools for one gen­eration.

The signing of the peace with Poland allowed the Soviet command to concentrate its efforts on Wrangel. By mid-October "a political and mili­tary" agreement had been reached between the Soviet government of the Ukraine and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army of Makhno.¹⁴⁰ By then the Soviet army outnumbered Wrangel's by "more than four to one in infantry and almost three to one in cavalry."¹⁴¹ A few military successes by the Whites during the summer of 1920 could not alter the outcome of the struggle, nor did a few political reforms which Wrangel decided to institute. Wrangel, a conservative, found himself obliged to agree to reforms that even the liberal Denikin had rejected, but it was too late. During the first half of November, Soviet troops occupied the Crimea. The remnants of Wrangel's army boarded ships and sailed into exile. For the White movement defeat had come.

THE PEASANT WAR

The war between Reds and Whites, between the regular Red Army and the regular White armies, was only one aspect of the civil war. The other was the peasant war. Peasant wars had figured prominently in Russian history—especially those led by Stepan Razin in the seventeenth century and by Emelyan Pugachev in the eighteenth. The peasant war of the twen­tieth century surpassed both of those in area and numbers involved. The Decree on Land, adopted on October 26, 1917, legalized the peasants' seizure of the great landed estates, which were abolished without compen­sation. The peasants, having gained what they wanted, considered the revolution over. The party of the proletariat, however, having taken power, insisted that the peasants provide grain and soldiers for a revolution the peasants no longer wanted. Conflict was inevitable.

During the summer of 1918 revolts broke out in many cities. Among the rebels were not only supporters of the old regime but also some of the most politically conscious members of the working class—rail workers, printers, and metalworkers. These anti-Bolshevik outbreaks were especially wide­spread in the Urals region, an important industrial center. 'The Left SRs stirred up the backward elements of the working class against us in the factories of Kushva, Rudyansk, Shaitansk, Yugovsk, Setkino, Kaslino, and elsewhere," a Soviet historian acknowledges.¹⁴² In elections to the Izhevsk

Soviet at the end of May 1918, the Bolsheviks won only 22 seats out of 170. As always in such cases, they walked out of the soviet "in protest" and declared it "anti-Soviet." In August a rebellion broke out in Izhevsk. "The immediate pretext for the revolt," writes the historian Spirin, "was the worsening of the food situation in the city and some improper actions of certain individual leaders of party and government bodies" [emphasis added—M. H.]. But the main reason, in Spirin's opinion, was "social." "A large number of workers in Izhevsk, as is well known, were contaminated by a petit bourgeois mentality."¹⁴³ The workers of neighboring Votkinsk joined the insurgent Izhevsk workers. Together they formed the People's Army of Izhevsk, more than 30,000 strong. Defeated after a hundred days of fighting near Izhevsk and Votkinsk, the soldiers of this army retreated eastward with their families and became one of Kolchak's toughest fighting units.

The "petit bourgeois mentality" contaminating these insurgent workers was expressed in their opposition to living in hunger, to petty tyranny by "certain individual leaders," to the loss of rights they had enjoyed before the revolution, and in general to conditions that were worse than before the proletarian party took power.

The "petit bourgeois mentality" of the peasants was expressed in their desire to work the land freely, to dispose of the fruits of their labor as they pleased, and not to go back to war. The bloody conflict between the peasants and the Bolsheviks was not the result of grain requisitioning alone. The peasants believed that the revolution would bring them freedom. The ideal of liberty embodied in the ancient Russian word volya, implying total lack of constraints, stirred the vast peasant mass. The soviets were seen as a form of self-government for the countryside that would free it from the burdensome rule of city people. The countryside wanted to live without the cities. In response the cities declared war on the countryside. A "food army" was organized to requisition grain, and draconian measures were employed to suppress peasant unrest. 'To break the kulak resistance, the dictatorship of the proletariat used extraordinary measures: trials before revolutionary tribunals, imprisonment, confiscation of property, the taking of hostages, and even the shooting of people on the spot in cases of armed resistance."¹⁴⁴

Any opposition to the Soviet government, any expression of discontent with Bolshevik policies among the peasants, was declared the work of "kulaks." But the term kulak had never been clearly defined. The purported number of kulak households in rural Russia at the time of the revolution and civil war varies depending on the date of the source. In 1924 a Soviet historian wrote: "Under existing conditions in our country, only by stretching the figures could one say that kulak households account for 2 or 3 percent, and for even these households it has not yet been demonstrated clearly enough that they function as kulak households."¹⁴⁵ In 1964 a Soviet his­torian asserted, 'The kulaks represented 15 percent of all peasant house­holds."¹⁴⁶ In August 1918 Lenin placed the number of kulak families at 2 million, out of 15 million peasant families.¹⁴⁷ But in April 1920, at the Ninth Party Congress, he spoke of only "1 million" rural families engaged in "exploiting the labor of others."¹⁴⁸ This figure was insignificant in a country whose population in 1920 was 130.5 million, with 110.8 million living in the countryside.

"The kulak is the enemy" was a formula that made little sense, the definition of kulak being so unclear and the officially acknowledged number of kulaks being so insignificant. Therefore the phrase was turned around: "Any enemy must be a kulak." An initial wave of peasant revolts swept the country in 1918. According to the official figures of the Cheka, between July and November 108 "kulak rebellions" broke out in the Soviet Republic. For the entire year there were "245 major anti-Soviet uprisings in the twenty provinces of Central Russia alone."¹⁴⁹

Mikhail Kalinin, president of the Central Executive Committee, who played the role of peasants' representative in the heart of the proletarian party, stated in May 1919: "I believe that unrest among the peasants can only be the result of a misunderstanding, because no better government could be imagined for the peasants than the Soviet government."¹⁵⁰ But the peasants were able to imagine a better one quite easily—one without Communists. The peasant revolts rarely put forward explicit political pro­grams, but there were three common demands: an end to grain requisi­tioning; removal of Communists from the soviets; and an end to Communist terror. One of the most moving documents of the period was a letter of July 31, 1919, to Lenin from Filipp Mironov, commander of a Cossack corps of the Red Army, expressing the grievances primarily of the Cossacks but also of the Russian peasantry as a whole. Mironov objected first of all, in the name of the peasantry, to any immediate leap into communism, the forcing of peasants into communes. "I think," he wrote, "that the Com­munist system is a lengthy process requiring much patience; it must come from the heart and not by force." Mironov sharply protested the monstrous cruelty that accompanied the establishment of Soviet power in the Don region: "Vladimir Ilyich, it is impossible—I don't have enough time and paper—to describe the horrors of 'Communist construction' on the Don. And in other rural areas it is no better." Mironov rejected what he called "the diabolical plan to exterminate the Cossacks, after which of course would come the turn of the middle peasants." He warned Lenin that if the bloodthirsty policy of the Communist party was not changed it would be necessary to stop fighting Krasnov and start fighting the Communists.¹⁵¹ A former lieutenant colonel in the tsarist army, Mironov had sided with the Bolsheviks immediately after the October revolution and became a cele­brated commander of the Red Army. Nevertheless he was executed by the Cheka in Moscow's Butyrki prison in 1921.

The reason for the large number of peasant revolts in Central Russia was that it was within close reach of the urban power centers and was therefore exploited with particular intensity by the requisitioning units. But as the requisitions spread to other regions, the peasants rebelled there, too.

The Cossack regions rose up against the Communists, and so did the Ukraine. A Soviet historian notes, "In the Ukraine by mid-1919 the entire peasantry, all sections of it, were opposed to Soviet power."¹⁵² A party official admitted in 1920: "In the Makhno movement it is hard to tell where the poor peasant leaves off and where the kulak begins. It was a mass peasant movement."¹⁵³

In March 1919 a Red Army brigade that had been sent to Byelorussia rebelled. The insurgents took Gomel and Rechitsa. The brigade consisted mainly of peasant soldiers from Tula, who made common cause with the local insurgent committee of Polesye, which represented the Byelorussian peasantry. In an appeal to the peasants the new commander of this "First Army of the People's Republic," an ensign named Strekopytov, announced the formation of a "new people's power," the abolition of grain requisitioning and emergency taxes, and an end to the war. The slogans of the insurrection were: (1) all power to the Constituent Assembly; (2) a mixture of private and governmental initiative in commerce and industry; (3) strict laws pro­tecting the interests of labor; (4) respect for civil liberties in practice; (5) land to the people; and (6) entry into the League of Nations by the Russian Republic.¹⁵⁴

In early 1919 a peasant revolt broke out in the middle Volga region— the so-called chapan revolt.¹⁵⁵ Intensified grain requisitioning in the Volga region was accompanied by

a series of additional obligations: delivery of carts to the army; provision of firewood for the cities and the railroad; compulsory hauling of goods for the army; and commandeering of horses. ... At the same time the disrupted transport system and the priority given military shipments prevented man­ufactured goods and other supplies from being delivered in return for the grain sent to the cities.¹⁵⁶

The insurgents captured several towns and nearly reached Syzran.

In the Fergana region of Central Asia in the summer of 1919 the Peasant Army, organized to protect the Russian population from armed units of Muslim peasants, reversed itself and reached an agreement with the anti- Bolshevik Muslims. The Peasant Army, under the command of К. I. Monstrov, agreed to joint operations with the Muslim peasants of Madamin- bek.¹⁵⁷ As in other regions, the spark that set off the insurrection was requisitioning and the "grain monopoly," which came to Turkestan that summer.

The entire peasantry of Russia was resisting. Besides the major revolts, countless minor ones broke out. From 1918 to 1920 the reality of the peasant war was concealed beneath the war between Reds and Whites. Yet all along the peasants were fighting on two fronts. A peasant song of the time included these words:

Hey, little apple tree, Color so ripe,

On the left we fight the Reds, On the right the Whites.

By the end of 1920 the civil war was actually over. The Red Army had won. Soviet power had completed its "triumphal march," begun in October 1917 but interrupted by the war. The danger that the large landowners would return was now past. The peasants considered the land theirs for good. Resistance to the requisitions and to the party's policy in the coun­tryside intensified. The Soviet authorities responded more harshly than ever.

From 1920 to 1921 the civil war became a peasant war. Mikhail Pok- rovsky, the first Russian Marxist historian, wrote that in 1921 "the heartland of the Russian Republic was almost completely surrounded by peasant uprisings, from Makhno on the Dnepr to Antonov on the Volga."¹⁵⁸ But the dimensions of the war were far greater than indicated by Pokrovsky. The Red Army was battling the peasantry in Byelorussia, in the southeast of European Russia, in eastern and western Siberia, in Karelia, and in Central Asia.

Just as the peasant revolt spread geographically, it grew numerically, becoming a genuine mass movement. Entire armies appeared. By the end of 1920 Makhno's army in the Ukraine was 40,000-50,000 strong. The peasant army led by Antonov in the Tambov and Voronezh regions numbered 50,000 in January 1921. An informational report from the Bolshevik party's regional committee in the Kuban area spoke of the formation of "full-scale

rebel armies" there in the spring of 1921. In western Siberia, the Ishim District (uezd) alone had 60,000 peasant rebels, and there were peasants fighting throughout the region, in the provinces of Chelyabinsk, Ekater­inburg, Tyumen, Tobolsk, and elsewhere. The "First Army of Justice," led by Sapozhkov, active along the Volga, had 1,800 bayonets, 900 sabers, 10 machine guns, and 4 artillery pieces.¹⁵⁹ By comparison, the White armies in the period of February 1—15, 1919, had 85,000 men on the southern front, 140,000 on the eastern front, 104,000 on the western front, 12,500 in northern Russia, and 7,500 in the Northern Caucasus.¹⁶⁰

The tactics of the peasant fighters varied according to local conditions, their material resources, and the talents of their commanders. Makhno and Antonov favored guerrilla warfare, sudden attacks and speedy retreats. Perfect knowledge of the terrain and, above all, the support of most of the peasants allowed the rebels to "swim like fish in the sea" and assured the success of these tactics. The enemy was furious and denounced the guer­rillas because they would not "engage in open battle, face to face, but resorted instead to sneak attacks, like bandits and thieves."¹⁶¹ In other areas the peasant armies did engage in open combat, laying siege to cities and taking many. In February 1921 peasant units in the lower Volga region took Kamyshin, and in March Khvalynsk.¹⁶² At the same time Siberian peasant armies took Tobolsk and Kokchetav and occupied all seven districts of Tyumen Province, four districts of Omsk Province and Kurgan District in Chelyabinsk Province. They laid siege to Ishim, Yalutorovsk, and Kurgan and reached the approaches of Akmolinsk and Agbasar.¹⁶³

Operational command of the campaigns against the peasants went to the most prominent military leaders of the Red Army, including the commander- in-chief, Sergei Kamenev, two commanders of fronts, Tukhachevsky and Frunze, and such commanders of armies as Budyonny, Yakir, Fedko, Tyu- lenev, and Uborevich. Just as under Catherine the Great the best-known generals were sent in pursuit of Pugachev, in 1921 the Red commanders who had won the greatest fame in battle with the Whites were assigned to hunt down Antonov, Makhno, Sapozhkov, and the other peasant chieftains.

Tukhachevsky, who a moment before had been knocking at the gates of Western Europe, took charge of operations against the Antonov rebellion. In May 1921 he had under his command 35,000 bayonets, 10,000 swords, several hundred machine guns, and 60 cannon. The latest in military technology was available for his use: armored cars and airplanes. Tuk­hachevsky was issued orders that said: 'The task of eradicating these bands must not be thought of as a more or less prolonged operation, but as a serious and urgent military mission, a campaign, even a war."¹⁶⁴

Antonov's comrades did not leave behind a history of their movement written from their own point of view. All the leaders of the movement were killed. All that is known of the rebellion comes from official Soviet sources.

Antonov himself, a Socialist Revolutionary from Tambov, had spent many years in prison before the revolution. He first came out against Bolshevik policies in August 1918. In the spring of 1919 he began a systematic struggle against the local authorities in the Tambov region. In 1920 the Tambov peasants refused to accept the policy of confiscation any longer, a policy enforced by the cruelest methods. Its harshness can be guessed from the following tactful admissions in a circular addressed to all provincial food supply committees by the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets: "Requisitions, which are a burdensome obligation to the state, are carried out by persuasion and by force. But there are many cases in which force has been applied in illegal and unacceptable ways." The circular, dated February 23, 1921, added that "violations of revolutionary legality" had by that time become a regular part of "the work of the food supply system."¹⁶⁵ Rebelling against this system, the peasants joined Antonov. "In the Tambov District the following percentages of the population have joined the bandits: in the village of Aleksandrovka, 25 percent; the village of Afanasyevka, 30 percent; Khitrovo and Pavlodarovo, 40 percent. ... In some villages of Kirsanov District more than 80 percent of the male population belong to the outlaw bands."¹⁶⁶

No Soviet historian has yet claimed that the number of kulaks in Tambov Province ever reached 80 percent, or even 25 percent. Antonov's was an army of peasants, not kulaks. The full military might of the Soviet Republic was thrown against this army. A Central Interdepartmental Commission for the Struggle Against Banditry was formed, including representatives from the party's Central Committee, the government's Council of Labor and Defense, the Cheka, even the Commissariat of Posts and Telegraph. The head of the commission was Efraim Sklyansky, deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic.¹⁶⁷

In the war against the peasants not only were regular military units used, the rebel movements were widely infiltrated by agents. A retired Chekist has described how Antonov's command staff was penetrated this way.¹⁶⁸ No less important, however, were the "administrative measures." First of all, hostages were taken—people who would be shot if any rebel units appeared in the given area. Anyone who "harbored bandits" or their families would also be shot.¹⁶⁹ After March 1921 the families of "bandits" began to be deported from Tambov Province. In June the commission to combat banditry found it necessary, "although most of the bands in Tambov Province have been smashed and the kulaks have come to understand the power of the

Soviet government," to deport from the province "all persons who were involved in any way with banditry, including some rail workers." In 1929, Kalinin recalled the Antonov rebellion. It had been necessary, he said, to deport to the north of Russia "the villages most seriously infected with banditism." In other words, entire villages were deported. "Many peasants in Tambov and Voronezh provinces," Kalinin recalled, "took part in that struggle between Soviet power and the old world."¹⁷⁰ It was not by accident, incidentally, that Kalinin was discussing the subject of mass repression against the peasants in 1929. That year a new phase began in "the struggle between Soviet power and the old world"—forced collectivization and "de- kulakization."

Tukhachevsky, commander of the Tambov punitive expedition, summed up the experience of pacification as follows:

The Sovietization of the centers of rebellion in Tambov Province followed a definite progression, district by district. After troops were brought into a given district, we would concentrate maximum force there—the army, the Cheka, and the party and Soviet apparatuses. While the military units were busy wiping out the bands based in the district and establishing revolutionary committees, the Cheka was catching any surviving bandits. After Soviet power was consolidated in one district, all our forces were transferred to the next.¹⁷¹

The most important element in pacification 'Tambov style" was not the destruction of the armed rebel units but the eradication of the "spirit of rebellion" after armed resistance had been overcome. This task was en­trusted to the Cheka, which worked hand in glove with the party committees. On April 4, 1921, the Central Committee sent a letter to the party province committees with the following instructions: "The province committees of the party and the Cheka units in each province must constitute a single whole in the work of preventing or suppressing counterrevolutionary out­breaks in the affected area."¹⁷² It may be assumed that the idea of fusing the Cheka and the party committees into "a single whole" was a development of Lenin's thought that "a good Communist has the qualities of a good member of the Cheka."¹⁷³

The outbreak of peasant war was explained away very simply: it had been instigated by White Guards and Anglo-French imperialists. On Sep­tember 8, 1921, Pravda reported that Antonov had "received his orders from abroad, from the Central Committee of the Cadet party." The Cheka reported to the Council of People's Commissars: "It has now become clear that in Ryazan, Tula, Kaluga, Smolensk, Tambov, and Tver provinces, uprisings were organized according to a general plan with the cooperation of Anglo-French capital."¹⁷⁴ An awareness of the aims and demands of the peasant rebels, however, is sufficient grounds for rejecting this conspiracy theory out of hand. In May 1920 a congress of the working peasants of Tambov Province adopted an insurrectional program calling for: the over­throw of Soviet power and destruction of the Communist party; the convening of a Constituent Assembly on the basis of universal, equal, direct suffrage and a secret ballot; the establishment of a provisional government, com­posed of representatives of the parties and associations that had fought the Bolsheviks, to rule until the Constituent Assembly was held; the land to go to those who work it; both Russian and foreign capital to be allowed to help revive the country's economy.¹⁷⁵

The peasant rebels east of the Volga also called for the replacement of Soviet power by a Constituent Assembly, universal suffrage, denational­ization of the land, an end to grain requisitioning, free trade, abolition of collective farms, the transfer of power on the local level to "councils of three" or "councils of five" elected by general assemblies. They demanded recognition for all parties except the monarchist Black Hundreds and the dissolution of all institutions of the Bolshevik party as "harmful to the working people."¹⁷⁶

In western Siberia the peasants demanded the institution of "genuine popular sovereignty"—peasant dictatorship, convening of the Constituent Assembly, denationalization of industry (for "the nationalization of factories and plants at base destroys the country's economic life"), and egalitarian land tenure. An appeal by the Tobolsk Command of March 6, 1921, pro­claimed: 'The Communists say that there can be no Soviet power without Communists. Why? Can't we elect nonparty members to the soviets? Long live popular Soviet power! Down with the Communists! Long live the com­plete freedom of the people!"¹⁷⁷

The best known and most fully worked out program of peasant revolt was that of the Makhno movement. Many of its participants, including Makhno himself, wrote their memoirs, and a history of the movement by one of its members exists.

Kubanin, an authority on the Makhno movement, describes the reasoning of the Ukrainian peasants as follows:

Soviet power gave the land to the peasants and raised the slogan, "Steal back what was stolen." This was the work of the Bolsheviks. But the gov­ernment that carried out grain requisitioning, that refused to give all of the large landholdings to the peasants, and that organized state farms and com­munes—that is the government of "the commune," the government not of the Bolsheviks but of the Communists.

The peasants frequently expressed this attitude with the formula: "We're for the Bolsheviks, but against the Communists."¹⁷⁸

In June 1918 Makhno had a long talk with Lenin and tried to explain to him the attitude of the Ukrainian peasants. The peasant masses, Makhno said, saw the revolution as "a way of freeing themselves from the yoke of the landlord and the wealthy kulak but also from the servants of the rich, the political and administrative functionaries who rule from the top down." In his memoirs Makhno writes: "Lenin asked me the same question three times and was amazed each time at the answer," because the way the peasants understood the slogan "power to the local soviets" was not the way the Bolshevik leader understood it. For the peasants it meant that "the entire government must correspond in all ways directly to the will and consciousness of the working people themselves." Lenin objected: "The peasants of your area are infected with anarchism."¹⁷⁹

The political label Lenin sought to paste over this reality missed the main point: the peasants were willing to follow anyone, be it the SR Antonov, the "anarchocommunist" Makhno, the peasant chiefs who belonged to no party, or the Bolsheviks themselves when they gave the peasants the land and said "Steal back what was stolen." They would follow anyone if they thought it would lead to land and liberty.

The peasants accepted the revolution, interpreting it their own way, but refused to accept the Bolshevik regime.

FROM PEASANT WAR TO KRONSTADT

To Lenin, the innumerable peasant uprisings engulfing the country did not seem reason enough for a change of policy, for abandoning the attempt to build communism immediately. The peasant war did not threaten the urban centers. Its isolated hotbeds could be extinguished one by one. It was not a serious threat to the government. But the revolt of the Kronstadt sailors, as Lenin put it, lit up reality like a flash of lightning.

In late 1920 the workers, whose living conditions were growing constantly worse, began to express their discontent more and more loudly. Strikes broke out in Moscow and other industrial centers, but in Petrograd, the "cradle of the revolution," they assumed especially large dimensions. The strikers were declared not to be workers, since real workers would not go on strike against a "workers' state." "Do you really think these are workers striking?" asked a member of the Petrograd Executive Committee. "There are no real workers left in Petrograd: they are at the front, or in food supply work, and so on. These people are scum, self-seekers, shopkeepers hiding away in the factories while the war is on."¹⁸⁰

A decree of January 22, 1921, reducing the bread ration for workers by one third, was the straw that broke the camel's back.¹⁸¹ The strikes and demonstrations that began involved the workers of the Trubochny Metals Factory, the Patronny and Baltic plants, and giant Putilov Factory, and many other Petrograd factories. The demonstrations were dispersed by Communist officer cadets (kursanty), because regular units were no longer considered reliable. The situation in Petrograd in February 1921 was re­markably similar to that of February 1917. Red Army soldiers were not issued boots for fear that if they left their barracks they would join the protesters. On February 24 the party's Petrograd Committee announced the formation of an emergency Defense Council. The city was placed under martial law, and mass arrests began. At the same time extra rations were distributed to workers and soldiers: one tin of preserved meat and one pound of bread daily.¹⁸²

The disturbances in Petrograd spread to Kronstadt. The most active elements in the movement there were the sailors of the battleships Petro- pavlovsk and Sevastopol, who with the crew of the battleship Respublika had been mainstays of support for the Bolsheviks in 1917. On March 1 a mass meeting of the garrison and civilian population of Kronstadt endorsed a resolution drafted by the Petropavlovsk sailors. Among its demands were: new elections to the soviets by secret ballot, because "the present soviets do not express the will of the workers and peasants"; freedom of speech and the press for "workers and peasants, anarchists and left socialist par­ties"; the release of all "political prisoners of socialist parties"; a review of the cases of those being held in prisons and concentration camps; removal of the roadblock detachments (whose purpose was to prevent illegal trading in grain and other foodstuffs between town and country); and "full freedom of action in regard to the land," as well as the right to raise livestock, for peasants who did not employ hired labor.¹⁸³

A delegation from Kronstadt, sent to Petrograd to acquaint the workers with this resolution, was arrested. In reply Kronstadt formed a Provisional Revolutionary Committee, consisting of sailors and workers. Stepan Petri- chenko, a senior clerk on the Petropavlovsk, was elected chairman. On March 2 Lenin and Trotsky signed an order outlawing the Kronstadt move­ment, charging that it had been organized by "French counterintellegence" and branding the rebels' resolution an "SR—Black Hundred" document. It charged that the movement was led by a former tsarist general, Kozlovsky, and announced that martial law was extended to all of Petrograd Province.¹⁸⁴ Aleksandr N. Kozlovsky, commander of artillery at Kronstadt, was one of tens of thousands of military specialists serving in the Red Army. He played no part in organizing or leading the rebellion (although he and other specialists did give military advice to the rebels). He was singled out by official Soviet propaganda because, as the only former tsarist general at Kronstadt, he was indispensable for the myth of a "White Guard con­spiracy." His family was arrested, as were the families of all the Kronstadt rebels.

On March 5 Trotsky ordered the insurgents to surrender. "Only those who surrender unconditionally," he declared, "can count on the mercy of the Soviet Repubic."¹⁸⁵ Trotsky, who in 1917 had called the Kronstadt sailors the "pride and glory of the revolution," began preparations to take the island fortress by storm.

The Kronstadt rebellion, Lenin told the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921, was more dangerous to the Bolshevik government than Denikin, Kolchak, and Yudenich combined. It was so dangerous because of the proximity of Kronstadt to Petrograd and the fact that the rebels were military professionals with a powerful arsenal under their control. But there was a special danger in the anti-Bolshevik but revolutionary slogans of the Kron­stadt sailors: "All power to the soviets but not the parties"; "Down with counterrevolution from the left and from the right"; 'The power of the soviets will free the working peasantry from the Communist yoke." These appeals reflected the moods of the peasants but also of the workers. "Here in Kronstadt," a rebel proclamation said,

has been laid the first stone of the third revolution. ... This new revolution will also rouse the laboring masses of the East and of the West, by serving as an example of the new socialist construction as opposed to the bureaucratic Communist "creativity." The laboring masses abroad will see with their own eyes that everything created here until now by the will of the workers and peasants was not socialism.¹⁸⁶

The slogan of a "third revolution" directed against the "commissarocracy" could not fail to stir Lenin's worst fears. On March 7, artillery bombardment of Kronstadt and its outlying forts began.

To direct operations, Commander-in-Chief Sergei Kamenev and Com­mander of the Western Front Tukhachevsky were brought to Petrograd. Direct command of the forces gathered to suppress the rebellion was placed in Tukhachevsky's hands. Lenin, Trotsky, and the other Soviet leaders, who never stopped denouncing the "White general" Kozlovsky, were not at all troubled by the fact that former tsarist officers, colonels and generals, directed the operations against Kronstadt. An overwhelming force was con­centrated to crush the rebels. Against the 3,000—5,500 sailors who were defending Kronstadt,¹⁸⁷ approximately 50,000 troops attacked across the ice from the coasts north and south of the island fortress. The Red forces broke through the Kronstadt defenses during the night of March 17—18. On March 18 all the Soviet newspapers carried front-page articles com­memorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Paris Commune and denouncing Thiers and Galliffet, the "bloody butchers" who had suppressed the Com­munards and executed them en masse. In 1919 a bulletin of the Kiev Cheka, Krasny mech (Red sword), had given voice to the kind of thinking that in 1921 allowed bloody butchery against the workers and sailors of Kronstadt: 'To us everything is permitted, because we were the first in the world to take up the sword not for the purpose of enslavement and repression but in the name of universal liberty and emancipation from slavery."¹⁸⁸

The rebel sailors had done no more than arrest local Communists who refused to join them. The Communists, by contrast, took severe reprisals. Immediately after the suppression of the revolt thirteen Kronstadt sailors were shot. Executions continued in the prisons of Petrograd. A large number of Kronstadt sailors were sent to the Pertominsk concentration camp on the White Sea, where many of them died. Petrichenko, who fled to Finland, lived there until 1945, when he was turned over to the Soviet government; he died in a camp.¹⁸⁹ Later Soviet historians, not content with repeating the charges about "the White general Kozlovsky" and "French intelli­gence," added another culprit to share the blame for the uprising—Trotsky and the Trotskyists.¹⁹⁰

The most important thing about Kronstadt was that it made Lenin realize that his policy of building communism posthaste had suffered a defeat.

CHAPTER

THE SEARCH FOR A "GENERAL LINE," 1921-1925

A STEP BACKWARD

In a letter to Maxim Gorky, Mikhail Pokrovsky described a proposed history of the civil war whose chronological framework would stretch from the February revolution to Kronstadt and the Antonov revolt. Thus, for the chief official Soviet historian the suppression in 1921 of the Kronstadt revolt and of the peasant movement in Tambov Province marked the end of the civil war.

Earlier, in 1920, Soviet power had been established in Siberia, Tur­kestan, and the Ukraine. In some areas it was impossible for various reasons to install a Soviet regime directly. There, transitional forms were introduced: the Far Eastern Republic, which lasted from April 1920 until the fall of 1922, when the Japanese left the region once and for all; the People's Republic of Khorezm, founded in February 1920; and the People's Republic of Bukhara, founded in September 1920.

The formation of the People's Republic of Bukhara was preceded by the emergence of a pro-Communist left wing in the Young Bukhara party. That

party then organized an uprising in Chardzhou and asked for help from the Red Army, located nearby. Red Army units under the command of Frunze immediately lent a fraternal hand. Despite stubborn resistance by troops loyal to the emir of Bukhara, the city and its subject territory were taken. The emir fled, and the People's Republic was proclaimed.

The Sovietization of the Caucasus followed a similar scenario. In April 1920 the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party formed a special Cau­casus Bureau, the Kavburo, and placed it under the command staff of the Eleventh Red Army, operating in the Northern Caucasus. The Kavburo did the thinking, and the Eleventh Army carried out the plan. In late January 1920 Chicherin, the commissar of foreign affairs, sent a note to the Azer­baijan government demanding cooperation in the fight against Denikin and promising in return to recognize the independence of Azerbaijan. But as early as April 17 Lenin secretly named his own representative to be director of the future Soviet oil industry in Baku. The Kavburo urged the Baku Communists to launch an uprising on April 27. The Azerbaijan Commu­nists, with whom the Musavatist government was conducting negotiations (despite the fact that the Communists were officially illegal), issued an ultimatum demanding that the government surrender power to the Soviets. Before the twelve-hour ultimatum could expire, on April 28 an armored train carrying Ordzhonikidze and Kirov arrived in Baku. With them Soviet power came to Azerbaijan. Ordzhonikidze, as head of the Kavburo, directed a massive wave of repression, aimed primarily at the leaders of the na­tionalist movement. Soon the Azerbaijan Communist party announced the appearance of a new star on the horizon of the world revolution. The Baku newspaper Kommunist welcomed the arrival of an important visitor in No­vember 1920 with these words: "Arriving on a visit to Baku [today] is Comrade Stalin—a working-class leader of exceptional energy, firmness, and self-denial, the only recognized authority on questions of revolutionary tactics, and leader of the proletarian revolution, in the East and the Cau- casus. ¹

The absence of any Communist organization in Armenia, the result of the pro-Turkish policies of the Russian Communist party, delayed the So­vietization of that republic. An attempt by Armenian Communists living outside Armenia to organize a coup did not succeed. A war with Turkey which broke out in September 1920 ended quickly with the defeat of the Armenian army. On November 27 Stalin, after arriving in Baku, ordered Ordzhonikidze to begin operations against Armenia. On the same day Ord­zhonikidze received instructions from Lenin² to issue an ultimatum to the Armenian government: surrender power to the "Revolutionary Committee of the Soviet Socialist Republic," positioned nearby on Azerbaijan soil.

Without waiting for the deadline to expire, the Eleventh Army entered Armenian territory. On December 6 the Revolutionary Committee arrived in Erevan. A coalition government of Communists and Dashnaks was formed. On December 21, 1920, all laws of the Russian Republic (RSFSR) were made binding for Armenia. The Dashnaks were expelled from the govern­ment and repressed.

Georgia, the largest of the Transcaucasian republics, with a government enjoying popular support and a fairly strong army, was seen by Lenin as a serious opponent. When Ordzhonikidze, intoxicated by his success in Baku, asked for permission to invade Georgia, it was denied. The war with Poland had just begun, and Moscow did not want to fight on two fronts. On May 7, 1920, a treaty was signed in Moscow with the ambassador from Georgia. In the first clause the RSFSR recognized the independence and sovereignty of the Georgian state and renounced all former Russian privileges. In a secret clause Georgia pledged to legalize the Communist party and allow it to carry on its activities openly. Kirov, vice-president of the Kavburo, was appointed Soviet ambassador to Tiflis. "It was no secret to anyone," recalled the Georgian Communist leader Makharadze, "that under the cir­cumstances of the time (1920) the activities of the Communist party con­sisted exclusively of preparing for armed insurrection against the existing government."³ After Soviet power had been established in Azerbaijan and Armenia, Georgia found itself surrounded on three sides. Still Lenin con­sidered the occupation of Georgia premature. Sergei Kamenev, the Red Army commander-in-chief, had reported to Lenin three times that an in­vasion of Georgia could lead to war on a large scale in the Caucasus.⁴ Occupation of Georgia might also cause the collapse of talks then underway with Britain. Although Leonid Krasin, the Soviet representative in London, reported that Lloyd George had made a statement recognizing that the Caucasus was within the Soviet sphere of influence, Lenin's fears were not dispelled.

Sovietization of the Caucasus was considered necessary for economic and strategic reasons by all the Bolshevik leaders, despite differences over tactics. In January 1921 the Politburo passed a resolution to overthrow the Georgian government, but Lenin urged that the action be given the ap­pearance of an insurrection to which the Red Army would offer support. Georgian Communists were instructed to organize an uprising.⁵ On February 16 the Eleventh Army crossed the border to lend a "fraternal hand" to a Military Revolutionary Committee formed in the tiny village of Shulaveri two days earlier. The Georgian army was short of weapons. 'The most essential thing was to obtain rifles and cartridges. We sent telegrams every­where. No one could promise us anything. Only from London came a categorical reply, a refusal."⁶ On March 18 the Georgian government sur­rendered. Lenin, fearing a popular resistance movement if the methods used in Azerbaijan were repeated in Georgia, urged Ordzhonikidze to em­ploy milder tactics. Ordzhonikidze scorned Lenin's suggestion and set about the work of Sovietizing Georgia, using the same methods tested out in the other Caucasian republics (and for the preceding three years in the Russian Republic).

The Kronstadt rebellion had finally forced Lenin to reexamine his policy toward the peasantry. As late as the beginning of 1921 he still rejected all proposals to alleviate or alter the surplus grain appropriation system, the prodrazverstka. Kronstadt convinced him that, with the overwhelming ma­jority of the population opposed to the government's policy, the position of an occupying power in one's own country could no longer be maintained.

Lenin realized that he had made a mistake. In a conversation with Clara Zetkin at the end of 1920, he admitted he had been wrong to believe that the invasion of Poland would set off a revolution. The German Communist Zetkin recalled that as Lenin spoke his face had a look of inexpressible suffering. Lenin's face at that moment reminded the art lover Zetkin of the crucified Christ of Grunewald. Unfortunately no one was present to paint Lenin's face when he admitted his mistake in believing that communism could be built overnight in Russia: "We thought that under the surplus food appropriation system the peasants would provide us with the required quantity of grain, which we could distribute among the factories and thus achieve communist production and distribution." With less than full sin­cerity he added: "A not very lengthy experience convinced us that that line was wrong."⁷ The experience had lasted four years, from October 25, 1917, to October 17, 1921, when Lenin made this confession of error. It was indeed a lengthy experience, and very costly in human life. But by "admitting his error" Lenin made an important contribution to the art of ruling the Soviet Union: self-criticism by the Leader eliminates the mistake at once, as though it had never existed, and the Leader remains infallible.

On March 15, 1921, at the Tenth Party Congress, Lenin presented the New Economic Policy. The congress approved it. The era of NEP began.

The NEP was first and foremost an agrarian policy. 'The peasantry is dissatisfied with the form of its relations with us," Lenin explained to the Tenth Congress. "It does not want relations of this type and will not continue to live this way. ... The peasantry has expressed its will in this respect definitely enough. It is the will of the vast masses of the working popu­lation."⁸ At his suggestion the congress changed the type of relations "be­tween them and us." The surplus grain appropriation system (prodrazverstka) was replaced by the "tax in kind" (prodnalog).

For the year 1921-22 the tax in kind was set at 240 million poods (2.5 million centners) of grain, approximately one third of the amount previously set for requisitioning during that year. One might conclude that this was a substantial easing of the burden on the peasantry—except for the fact that about 240 million poods had actually been requisitioned during 1920-21. The "easing of the burden" can be judged more precisely if the tax in kind is compared to the direct taxes imposed before 1914: the tax in kind was 399 percent of the 1914 tax.⁹ The significance of the policy change was not that it eased the tax burden but that it limited arbitrary action by the state. On March 8, 1921, the peasants of Panfilov Township (volost), in the Gryazevetsk District of Vologda Province addressed a letter to "our beloved leader and great genius, Comrade Lenin." They informed him:

At the present time practically everything has been taken from the peasants of our township—bread, grain, livestock, hay, raw materials. ... In 1920 because of the drought the yield relative to seed grain was only four to one, but the agents of the food supply committee did their requisitioning on the basis of a six-to-one yield.

The Vologda peasants, begging not to be considered "pernicious ele­ments" but on the contrary "citizens wishing to do fruitful work to strengthen the liberty of the workers and peasants," proposed that requisitioning be replaced by a tax in kind, so that the peasants "would know how much tax was owed and when it was due."¹⁰ The decree on the tax in kind regularized both matters.

The new policy could not be limited to the tax change. It implied that the peasants could increase agricultural production without fear of confis­cation. But it made no sense to allow this surplus unless it could be sold legally. Up to the last Lenin did not wish to abandon his dream of an immediate leap into communism. At the Tenth Party Congress Trotsky recalled that a year earlier, in February 1920, he himself had suggested that a tax in kind be substituted for requisitioning. At the Eighth Congress of Soviets, in December 1920, the Mensheviks and SRs—the last time they were allowed to participate openly in a discussion—urged that grain requisitioning be abandoned. Lenin rejected all these proposals as consti­tuting a return to capitalism. In his conception commerce and capitalism were the same thing; consequently, freedom to trade meant a step back toward capitalism. At the end of 1920 a decree was passed declaring that all food products held by the state would thenceforth be given out free of charge. Actually there was hardly any food, but the Bolshevik leaders still thought that communism was just around the corner.

In abandoning grain requisitioning, Lenin clung compulsively to the hope that he could avoid granting freedom of trade, that he would not have to allow the market to sully the purity of communist relations. Under his plan, exchange between peasant producers would remain strictly a local phenomenon (with products being transported by horsedrawn vehicles only, not over the rails). This trade would be more like barter than buying and selling. Utopianism died hard. But reality proved stronger. In the fall of 1921 the leader of the revolution was forced to admit: "[The] system of commodity exchange has broken down. ... Nothing has come of commodity exchange; the private market has proved too strong for us; and instead of the exchange of commodities we have gotten ordinary buying and selling, trade."¹¹ The New Economic Policy likewise marked a 180-degree turn in industry. Small private businesses were authorized, individuals were al­lowed to rent large enterprises, and foreigners were allowed to lease some factories and mining operations as concessions. Even more important was the change in attitude toward labor. Workers had taken part in all protests against the Communist regime, but their discontent was most vividly ex­pressed in the sharp decline of labor productivity. "In the years 1919- 1920 the average output annually of a worker was only 45 percent of the quantity of products that resulted from his labor before the war."¹² The plan for a "great leap forward" into communism based itself on the need to force the workers to work. Just as Dzerzhinsky had proclaimed the concentration camps to be "schools of labor," Trotsky advocated the "mil­itarization of labor" and the formation of "labor armies."¹³ The people's commissar of war questioned the notion that slave labor was unproductive. "Is it true that compulsory labor is always unproductive? We have to reply that is the most pitiful and worthless liberal prejudice."¹⁴ Human beings do not want to work, Trotsky argued, but social organization forces them to, driving them to it with a whip. If it were true that compulsory labor was unproductive, he argued, "our entire socialist economy would be doomed to failure. For we can have no way to socialism except by the authoritative regulation of the economic forces and resources of the country, and the centralized distribution of labor power in harmony with the general state plan."¹⁵ The NEP constituted an admission that forced labor was unpro­ductive after all. It was an attempt to find "another road to socialism." The principle of concentration, the amalgamation of enterprises into "trusts," was introduced, along with that of khozraschet (the requirement that an enterprise be financially self-sustaining, rather than dependent on central state funds). On January 1, 1922, the principle of self-financing was ex­tended to the forced labor camps. Pravda wrote on August 30, 1922: 'The experience of the first few months during which the compulsory labor camps have operated on the basis of self-financing have produced positive results."

In 1921, after all the horrors of world war, revolution, and civil war, one more calamity befell Russia: a famine of such severity as the country had never known.

The threat of famine became evident early in the summer of 1921. At first the government sought to minimize the extent of the disaster. On August 6, in an appeal to the world proletariat, Lenin announced that "several provinces" of Russia were affected by a famine no less terrible than the famine of 1891. The population of the famine-struck Volga region in 1891 was 964,627. In 1921 the count was in the millions: no less than 20 percent of the country's population and more than 25 percent of the rural population starved.¹⁶ The famine was grisly. The writer Mikhail Osorgin, editor of the newsletter Pomoshch (Relief), the organ of the All-Russia Famine Relief Committee, knew the situation in the areas of famine from the hundreds of letters the committee received. He wrote about the cannibalism that became an everyday occurrence: "People mainly ate members of their own families as they died, feeding on the older children, but not sparing newborn infants either, those who had hardly had the chance to live, despite the fact that there wasn't much to them. People ate off to themselves, not sitting together at a table, and no one talked about it."¹⁷ The famine was a test of the capabilities of the new system. For the first time it confronted a task that could not be solved by force. The success of the October revolution and the victory in the civil war had created a mentality of omnipotence among the Bolsheviks, the conviction that everything could be solved by a soldier's rifle or a Chekist's pistol. Ekaterina Kuskova recalled an account by Bonch-Bruevich of a visit to the Kremlin by Maxim Gorky in 1919.

We entered an office and found Lenin bent over some documents in deep concentration. "What are you doing?" Gorky asked. "I'm thinking about the best way to cut the throats of all the kulaks who won't give bread to the people." "Now that's an original occupation!" Gorky exclaimed. "Yes, we are taking them head on in the fight for bread, the most elementary question of human existence."¹⁸

To Lenin the struggle for the existence of some was inseparable from the extermination of others. The best way to obtain bread was to "cut the throats of all the kulaks." But in 1921 throat cutting could accomplish nothing. The peasantry had no grain stocks left. Even seed grain had been confis­cated. All the leaders of the Soviet government blamed the famine on the drought. In 1891 Lenin had had a different kind of explanation: 'The government bore sole responsibility for the famine and 'the general ruin.'"¹⁹ But in 1921 the famine was the result of drought and civil war. At the Tenth Party Congress Trotsky briefly summarized the results of the war: "We have destroyed the country in order to defeat the Whites." The main cause of the famine, however, was the requisitioning policy, the policy of an immediate leap into communism.

The absence of food reserves, the spread of the famine to the cities (unlike in 1891), the ruined transport system, the peasant revolts, and the unrest among the workers—all these created a critical situation. Only the capitalist countries were in a position to provide immediate assistance, more exactly, only the United States, because Western Europe was ex­hausted by the war and was barely able to feed itself. The Soviet govern­ment, however, would not ask the capitalists for help, assuming that they would automatically reject such a request. To Lenin it seemed only natural that the capitalist countries would refuse to help a government whose openly proclaimed goal was world revolution. Nevertheless, the impossible situ­ation finally forced Lenin, after long hesitation, to agree to the formation of a nongovernmental organization, the All-Russia Famine Relief Com­mittee. On July 21, 1921, Mikhail Kalinin signed the decree of the Central Executive Committee authorizing formation of the committee, which in­cluded some of the most prominent Russian scientists, literary and cultural figures, and political personalities of the prerevolutionary era. Many of them hesitated a long time before agreeing to collaborate with the Soviet government.

Lenin set precise limits on this never to be repeated experiment in cooperation on an equal basis between the Soviet government and the Russian intelligentsia:

Today's directive to the Politburo: Kuskova must be rendered strictly harm­less. You are in the "Communist cell" [of the Famine Relief Committee] and will have to be on your toes, keeping a strict watch over everything. We shall get Kuskova to give us her name, her signature, and a couple of carloads [of food] from those who sympathize with her (and others of her stripe). Not a thing more. (Lenin's emphasis—M. H.)²⁰

Ekaterina Kuskova, a journalist who had been prominent in the early Russian Social Democratic movement, later a liberal, was one of the ini­tiators of the committee. She explained to Kamenev: "Help can come only from abroad. It will not come by itself. They will think their aid will go to you and the Red Army rather than to those who are starving. "²¹ A guarantee was necessary. The All-Russia Famine Relief Committee served as that guarantee. Gorky, a member of the committee, appealed to world public opinion to send aid, as did the committee as a whole.

During this period Lenin's prime concern was to assure food supplies to the industrial centers, above all to Moscow and Petrograd. Every day he sent telegrams to the southern and eastern parts of the country calling for bread. "In view of the extremely grave food supply situation at the center," he said in a telegram to Rakovsky, chairman of the Ukrainian Council of People's Commissars, "I propose: three quarters to be brought here, one quarter to be left for the cities and workers of the Ukraine. ... But bear in mind that the food crisis here is desperate and downright dangerous."²² In a telegram of May 4 he ordered the Siberian Revolutionary Committee to send 3 million poods (1 million centners) of wheat to the center during the month of May. His telegram of July 12, 1921, to Turkestan said: "With the same speed required in urgent military matters, it is of major political importance that you immediately load and send freight cars, express, to Moscow with 250,000 poods [82,000 centners] of wheat."²³ The lessons of the February crisis that produced Kronstadt were still fresh. Grain was confiscated from any possible source to prevent food riots in the working- class centers. A "shameful peace" was made with the intelligentsia, and Lenin bided his time, waiting for the New Economic Policy to produce results. But before these results materialized, who should come to the rescue but the imperialists.

On August 21, 1921, Maxim Litvinov, representing the Soviet Union, signed an agreement in Riga with a representative of the American Relief Administration (ARA), headed by Herbert Hoover. When N. Kutler, a member of the All-Russia Famine Relief Committee, heard about this agreement, he said: "Well, it's time for us to go home. ... Our job is done. Now only 35 percent of the population in the areas of the famine will die, instead of 50 or 70 percent."²⁴ Kutler was only partly right. The help from abroad did save millions, but it was not time for the committee members "to go home." Most of them were arrested right after the agreement with the ARA was signed, that is, as soon as they were no longer needed.

The August 31 Pravda reported on a special meeting of the Moscow Soviet at which its president, Lev Kamenev, "noted with satisfaction that an agreement had been reached between the Soviet government and Herbert Hoover's organization, an agreement that has already brought tangible re­sults." Kamenev reported that the first ship "loaded with food for the children" had arrived in Petrograd that day and that regular shipments would be coming from then on.

A man named Eiduk, a veteran agent of the Cheka who was attached to the ARA as the Soviet government's representative, writing in Pravda, May 25, 1922, gave the following summary of the work of the ARA and other relief organizations. As of May 1922, the ARA had fed 7,099,574 persons;

the American Friends Service Committee, 265,000; the International Child Relief Association, 250,751; the Nansen Committee, 138,000; the Swedish Red Cross, 87,000; the German Red Cross, 7,000; the British trade unions, 92,000; and the International Red Aid organization, 78,011. The article on the ARA in the 1926 edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia provides further information: The ARA was active in Russia from October 1, 1921, to June 1, 1923; at the height of its activity it fed approximately 10 million people; it spent nearly 137 million gold rubles during its operations, while the Soviet government spent approximately 15 million gold rubles in con­nection with the ARA. By 1930 the official Soviet reference works had changed their tone in regard to the ARA. The Small Soviet Encyclopedia of 1930 stated that "under the pretext of charity" the ARA had "helped to reduce the severity of the economic crisis in America by finding outlets for American goods." In 1950 the second edition of the Great Soviet En­cyclopedia asserted that the ARA "took advantage of the fact that it was allowed to organize its own apparatus on Soviet territory to engage in espionage and subversion and support counterrevolutionary elements. The counterrevolutionary actions of the ARA were energetically protested by the broad masses of the working people." The encyclopedia did not bother to explain why the ARA was allowed to operate on Soviet soil or what work it did other than "espionage and subversion." The first volume of the most recent edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia now admits that the ARA was "of some help in fighting the famine," but it still contends that "the ruling circles of the United States tried to use it to support counterrevo­lutionary elements, espionage, and subversion, to fight the revolutionary movement, and to strengthen the position of American imperialism in Eu­rope."²⁵ According to the figures of the Central Statistical Bureau of the USSR, 5,053,000 lives were lost because of the famine of 1921-1922.²⁶ These losses should be added to the 10,180,000 killed in the civil war of 1918-1920. Altogether, from 1918 to 1922, the country lost more than 14 million people, approximately 10 percent of the population. The Soviet demographer B. Ts. Urlanis gave the following estimates for the percentages of populations lost in other major civil wars: Spain, 1936—1939, 1.8 per­cent; the United States, 1861—1865, 1.6 percent. These figures help to illustrate the monstrous dimensions of the bloodletting in the Russian civil war. If we add to this the nearly 2 million lives Russia lost in World War I and the nearly 1 million persons lost to emigration after the revolution, we can understand how much the population diminished from 1914 to 1922.²⁷ The famine was a major test for the young Soviet government. All the unique features of the system were displayed: cruelty, vengefulness, and obstinacy. Lenin was willing to sacrifice a substantial section of the peasantry as long as the industrial centers were kept in food. Gorky, who was pressured by Lenin into leaving the Soviet Republic late in 1921, expressed his attitude toward the peasantry in a Berlin interview with Western journalists, an attitude that undoubtedly reflected the views of Lenin and the other Bolsheviks. "I assume that most of the 35 million affected by the famine will die."²⁸ The great humanist was optimistic about the future: 'The half-savage, stupid, difficult people of the Russian villages will die out... and their place will be taken by a new tribe of the literate, the intelligent, the vigorous."²⁹ This dream, or at least its first part, was realized ten years later. Those who hindered its immediate realization, especially those active in the All-Russia Famine Relief Committee, paid the price. Many of them, including Kuskova, were expelled from the Soviet Republic in 1922; others were arrested and sent into internal exile. The history of the committee and of relations with the ARA set the pattern for the Soviet government's dealing with those who tried to help it while main­taining their own independence: (1) make concessions, if there is no al­ternative; (2) renounce all concessions when the need for them is past; and (3) take revenge.

The famine showed the new government's stability, the determining factor behind which was the party, its ranks hardened by the awareness of their total isolation within the country, by the elitist character of their organi­zation, and by a feeling of total omnipotence. If the party was the skeleton of the state, the Cheka gave it muscle. The party was the source of the Idea: that everything is permitted because the party is doing the work of History. The Cheka provided the hands to put this great, all-permitting Idea into practice. Gorky made the categorical assertion that "the cruelty of the forms taken by the revolution is explained, in my opinion, by the exceptional cruelty of the Russian people."³⁰ He called the charges of brutality against the leaders of the revolution "lies and slander." In this he expressed the naivet6 common to many of his contemporaries, who failed to understand the true nature of the system then coming into existence, a system in which the repressive bodies played a vital role. Their omnipres­ence and omnipotence created a paralyzing atmosphere of fear in Soviet society. Along with fear, the enticements of hope contributed in a very important way to stability. The New Economic Policy embodied a promise of improvement in the situation. Soviet citizens began to assume—as they would many times thereafter—that since things couldn't get worse, they were bound to get better. Finally, the absence of any alternative contributed to stability. The program of the Whites had been defeated, and the socialist opponents of bolshevism were robbed of their arguments by the introduction of the NEP. The people had nothing left but to hope for the future.

Leonid Krasin, invited to London by Lloyd George to discuss the nor­malization of Anglo-Soviet relations, gave an interview to the London Ob­server, which was printed with the headline, "How the Famine Is Helping the Soviet Government." The attitude of the West toward starving Russia seems to have opened Lenin's eyes. He saw that the capitalist world did not understand the goals of the revolution. Ignorant of the danger, the capitalists preferred to make their profits today rather than think about tomorrow.

The lifting of the blockade by the Allies in January 1920 meant the end of their war against Soviet Russia. This action was followed by peace treaties between the Soviet Republic and three neighboring countries, Es­tonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In May 1920 Krasin began negotiations for a trade treaty. In July the Soviet government accepted Britain's three con­ditions: an end to hostilities and to propaganda warfare; repatriation of prisoners of war; and recognition in principle of debts to private individuals. At the height of the Polish—Soviet war the trade treaty was signed. Upon his return home, Krasin told the Communists of Petrograd how he had applied pressure to the British government:

We did everything we could to attract the British business community. When the honest burghers of the commercial establishment declined, we turned to the semi-speculator elements. We signed an agreement with the Armstrong Gun Factory for the repair of 1,500 locomotives. Armstrong put pressure on his workers, who in turn pressured Lloyd George by pointing out that orders from Russia would reduce unemployment. The British bourgeoisie began to have apprehensions about competition from Germany, and the trade agree­ment was signed.

Krasin also announced forthcoming agreements with Norway and Italy. Around the same time Sweden agreed to accept Soviet gold, the first country to do so. "At present," the people's commissar of foreign trade boasted, "we are very close to obtaining a major loan, and this big loan will be given by none other than France."³¹ When Lenin was warned in the summer of 1921 by opponents of his harsh policy toward the Famine Relief Committee that the arrest of its members might affect relations with France, formerly the chief supporter of the White movement, Lenin replied with full self- assurance: "Our policy will not undercut [trade] relations with France; it will speed them up. ... We are on the way to achieving trade talks with France."³² The agreement with the ARA convinced Lenin once and for all that it was possible to establish normal trade and diplomatic relations with the capitalist world by using the industrial and commercial interests against the diplomats and, conversely, using the diplomats against the industrial and commercial interests. Above all, the Soviet leaders concluded that it was possible to have normal relations with the capitalists without aban­doning the goal of world revolution.

A BI-LEVEL FOREIGN POLICY

In the spring of 1919 an unofficial diplomatic mission sent by Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson and headed by the American William Bullitt arrived in Moscow. Bullitt inquired into the Bolsheviks⁹ attitude toward a possible armistice between the Red and White armies, but in his detailed reports from Moscow he failed to mention the First Congress of the Third, or Communist, International (the Comintern). The congress was in session in the Soviet Republic's capital during Bullitt's visit and Pravda wrote about it at length, but the news seemed to have no interest for the Allied rep­resentative.

Of the thirty-four "delegates" to the First Congress of the Comintern, thirty lived in Moscow and worked for the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, two were chance visitors (from Norway and Sweden, where there were no Communist parties), and only two were actually mandated by foreign Communist parties. One of them, Hugo Eberlein, represented the German Communist party (KPD), which had been founded two months earlier. He had come to Moscow to express his party's disagreement with the idea of founding the Comintern. Rosa Luxemburg, the moving spirit behind the KPD, was opposed to the formation of a new international as long as "the relative backwardness of the Western revolutionary parties leaves all the initiative in the hands of the Bolsheviks." Despite Eberlein's objec­tions, Lenin insisted that the birth of the Third International be proclaimed in March 1919.

The new international organization, with its headquarters in Moscow and the expenses of its founding paid for by the Bolshevik party was awash in the glow of victorious revolution. It disdained to conceal its aims. In the first issue of the magazine Kommunisticheskii internatsional (Communist international) Grigory Zinoviev published an article, 'The Prospects for Proletarian Revolution," in which he made this prediction: "Civil war has flared up throughout Europe. The victory of communism in Germany is absolutely inevitable. In a year Europe will have forgotten about the fight for communism, because all of Europe will be Communist. Then the struggle for communism in America will begin, and possibly in Asia and other continents."

The Second Congress of the Comintern, in the summer of 1920, laid the basis for a bi-level foreign policy. The congress adopted the famous "twenty- one conditions" that had to be met by any party wishing to join the Com­intern, to become a section of the Third International. The standard pattern for a Communist party was established. It would be a detachment of an international army engaged in the struggle for power. Among the conditions for admission to the Comintern were the following: the obligation to help the Soviet Republic in its struggle against counterrevolution, employing all legal and illegal means to this end (condition 13); the obligation to combine legal and illegal methods in fighting against the government of one's own country (condition 3); and the obligation to form an underground organi­zation (condition 4).

The classic example of a bi-level foreign policy—aboveboard through the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and secretly through the Comintern— was Soviet policy toward Germany. The certainty of a revolution in Germany was one of the main arguments Lenin had used to justify the October revolution. The events of November 1918, when Germany might have become Communist but failed to do so, discouraged the Bolsheviks, but they did not give up hope. The Soviet government began to cooperate on the official level with the Weimar Republic, but activity aimed at the Sovietization of Germany never ceased. This activity increased sharply after the founding of the Comintern. A number of "specialists" on revolution— Radek, Zinoviev, Bela Kun, Maty as Rakosi—made preparations for the seizure of power by the German Communists. In April 1922 Germany and Soviet Russia signed a peace treaty in the Italian city of Rapallo. It provided for mutual renunciation of demands for war reparations, the establishment of diplomatic relations, and economic collaboration, including joint Soviet- German industrial and commercial firms. The Rapallo treaty broke the unity of the capitalist countries vis-&-vis Soviet Russia and freed both Germany and the Soviet Republic from diplomatic isolation. The obvious advantages of the Soviet—German treaty, the result of the Soviet govern­ment's own initiatives, did not prevent the Soviet leaders from continuing to use the Comintern and the KPD to foment revolution. In the fall of 1923, in fact, it seemed that nothing would stop the mighty forward stride of history.

"At the beginning of September 1923," a former Soviet diplomat wrote,

I passed through Moscow on my way to Warsaw. In Moscow everyone seemed fired up. The revolutionary movement in Germany was growing faster and faster. ... Comintern work was going ahead full steam. The future members of the Soviet government of Germany were being appointed. From among Soviet Russian leaders a solid group was chosen to become the nucleus of the future German Council of People's Commissars. The group included

economic experts... military men... Comintern figures... and several highly placed GPU officials.³³

At that time Pravda published some verses about Germany in flames: "A cry in the wind: It is time! In the swirling snow, a slogan: Fire!" During this time official relations between the Soviet and German governments remained impeccable.

Relations with England provide another example of the Soviet dual policy. England began to seek a rapprochement with Soviet Russia in 1920. Trade talks began. Some trade was already underway "through various neutral countries that had established trade relations with Soviet Russia."³⁴ Karl Radek noted that this situation helped Russia to grow stronger. The same Radek, at the Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East in September 1920, called on the workers and peasants of Persia, Turkey, and India to rise up against British imperialism, promising in the name of the Soviet government to provide arms "for our common battles and common victories."³⁵ Likewise at the Baku Congress Zinoviev, chairman of the Comintern, called for a jihad, a holy war, against Great Britain. Zinoviev was a member of the Politburo, the top executive body of the Soviet state. "It is no secret to anyone," Lev Kamenev, another member of the Politburo, admitted, "that the Central Committee and the Politburo of our party direct the Comin­tern."³⁶

The foreign policy of the young Soviet state was based on a principle enunciated by Lenin in December 1920: as long as capitalism and socialism exist they cannot live in peace.³⁷ At the height of the debates over the Brest-Litovsk treaty, Lenin presented a resolution to the Seventh Party Congress. It stated that the Congress authorized the Central Committee to break any and all peace treaties and to declare war against any imperialist government or against the entire world if the Central Committee considered the moment ripe.³⁸ The resolution was meant to placate the opponents of the Brest-Litovsk treaty, but it expressed the essence of Lenin's foreign policy. The proletarian state, the embodiment of progress, was always right in its relations with capitalist states, which were the embodiment of reaction. Whatever the Soviet state did was in accordance with the laws of history and therefore was entirely and completely justified.

THE RED TURNS RUSTY

The "step backward" Lenin took in March 1921 with the introduction of the NEP was conceived as a maneuver, a forced retreat. It was carried out on a moment's notice, a complete surprise to the ranks of the Bolshevik

party. Stalin suggested that the maneuver was a little late in coming: "Didn't we wait too long to abolish grain requisitioning? Did we really need such events as Kronstadt and Tambov to make us realize we could not go on living under war communism?"³⁹

The realization that it was impossible to live under war communism forced the government to change its policy, to abandon Utopia temporarily and return to reality. But Utopia was not rejected altogether; hope for the miracle of world revolution was kept alive. It was necessary to arrange a certain coexistence between reality and fantasy, the belief that tomorrow or the day after it would again be possible to take two, three, many more steps toward the final goal of communism. The coexistence of reality and fantasy gave a special quality to Soviet life in the early 1920s. As one Soviet poet described it, 'The color of the times has changed. No longer Red, but rusty."⁴⁰

For the second time in a few years a drastic reevaluation of values took place. Revolutionary ideas, which had reigned unchallenged since October 1917, sweeping aside all compromise or deviation from the ideal, suddenly seemed old-fashioned and out of place. The right to exist was restored to concepts that before March 1921 had been considered extinct or worthy of extinction.

The New Economic Policy removed the tourniquets that had totally cut off the country's blood supply. Denationalization of small businesses and of some medium-sized industries, legalization of private trade, and the beginnings of trade with foreign countries quickly restored circulation. People at the time commented on the miraculous opening of stores and the appearance in them of things people had once known but had forgotten even the look of. The hero of the novel Chevengur returns to his hometown:

At first he thought the Whites had taken [it]. There was a buffet at the train station where gray rolls were sold without a line and without ration cards. Near the station... there was a gray sign whose letters dripped because of the poor quality of the paint. The sign announced primitively and briefly:

Everything on Sale, To All Citizens! Prewar Bread!

Prewar Fish! Fresh Meat! Our Own Preserves!

... In the store the owner explained in a very concise and sensible way, to an old woman who had just come in, the meaning of these changes: "We've lived to see the day. Lenin tooketh away, and now Lenin giveth."⁴¹

The NEP opened the door to certain capitalist economic forms which coexisted with the socialist forms. It was possible to compare and make choices. The result was competition. The 1923 census revealed that 77 percent of wholesale trade was conducted by the state, 8 percent by co­operatives, and 15 percent by private individuals. In contrast, 83 percent of retail trade was in private hands and only 7 percent was state-controlled.⁴² The consumer could choose whether to buy from the government or from a private trader.

Money, which had lost all value during the revolution and civil war, reappeared on the scene. In principle it was supposed to have withered away. Besides, everyone had been issuing currency: the Soviet government, the White generals, municipalities, even factories. A numismatic catalog published in 1927 listed 2,181 types of currency that had circulated during the civil war. Mikhail Bulgakov wrote about "trillionaires," people owning trillions of rubles, in Moscow in late 1921.⁴³ When the possibility arose of using this money actually to buy goods, it suddenly became a serious factor. On February 15, 1924, a series of monetary reforms ended with the intro­duction of a new unit, a ruble with fixed value. It was called the chervonets and was worth ten prewar gold rubles. Backed by government gold, it also had historical tradition behind it. A unit of currency of the same name had existed under Peter the Great.

The times became "rusty" because, alongside the hierarchy of values created by the revolution, old values were restored. For example, a class of capitalists was now sanctioned by the Soviet government, although they were allowed no political power. These were the so-called Nepmen. They lived like people on the slope of a volcano, never knowing what the morrow might bring. But they had money, for the moment, and with it the opportunity to buy anything they wished. In the cities gambling houses and cabarets opened for business; luxury cars and coaches, furs and jewelry made their appearance.

The NEP inevitably provoked discontent within the ruling Communist party. It seemed a complete betrayal of revolutionary ideals. The hurt and angry question, Is this what we fought for? began to be heard. Before and after October 1917 the debates among the party's leaders had been about how to take power and how to hold it. Now a new question arose: What should we do with the power? This immediately led to another: Who in fact was exercising power?

The simplest answer was the proletariat. That was the official answer. Lenin had another answer: the dictatorship of the party, the vanguard of the proletariat. There was a problem, though. Ever since the civil war had ended, the proletariat had expressed its discontent more and more insis­tently. Radek quoted with indignation the words of an independent worker in reply to a Communist agitator: "No, we are not trying to get freedom for the capitalists and landowners. We want freedom for ourselves, the workers and peasants, freedom to buy what we need, freedom to travel from one city to another, to go from the factories to the villages—that's the kind of freedom we need."⁴⁴

The Bolshevik party was the master of the country. The party had been conceived and built as an army of professional revolutionaries. After it had achieved its aim of taking power, it did not wish to limit itself, to surrender part of its power to non-Communist government officials. The party wanted to be the government. Lev Kamenev, speaking at the Twelfth Party Congress in 1923, dotted all the is.

Those who speak against the party, who demand a separation of functions between the party and the government, want to impose on us the same division of powers that exists in other states. ... Let the Soviet government apparatus govern, they say, and let the party occupy itself with propaganda, with raising the level of Communist consciousness, etc. No, comrades, that would be too great an occasion for rejoicing for our enemies.⁴⁵

The party did not wish the Soviet state to be like "other states." It wanted all the power in its own hands.

Certainly the party had all the power. "We have quite enough political power," Lenin said in a speech to the Eleventh Party Congress in March 1922. 'The economic power in the hands of the proletarian state is quite adequate to ensure the transition to communism. What then is lacking?" By the time the Eleventh Congress took place, the party had been thoroughly purged as a result of a decision of the Tenth Congress a year earlier; in the intervening year 23.3 percent of the membership had been expelled. Still the party's leader was dissatisfied with the organization, even in its purged form. Lenin scolded the Communists for their lack of sophistication and questioned whether they were actually directing the machinery of state or being directed by it. He cited the lessons of history: "If the conquering nation is more sophisticated than the vanquished nation, the former imposes its culture upon the latter; but if the opposite is the case, the vanquished nation imposes its culture upon the conqueror." Lenin feared that his barbarians, having conquered Russia, were adopting the culture of those they had vanquished. He assailed the Communists for their lack of "so­phistication," by which he meant knowledge of administrative methods for running the state and the economy.⁴⁶

According to Lenin, during the year from the Tenth to the Eleventh Congress, "we showed quite clearly that we cannot run the economy." The reason for poor management, in Lenin's opinion, was "Communist conceit" (,komchvanstvo).⁴⁷ Communist conceit was the arrogance of conquerors who were sure that everything they did was right and that all problems could be solved by force. This kind of arrogance was a sin in Lenin's eyes because it undermined party discipline. The heroes of the civil war wanted their reward; each behaved like a prince in his own domain. Former front-line comrades formed cliques and challenged the authority of the Central Com­mittee. Lenin's tactic was to use one clique against the other, seeking to weaken them all and strengthen the Central Committee.

Aleksei Rykov described the situation to Liberman, a prominent spe­cialist in the prerevolutionary lumber industry, who was invited to take charge of the nationalized Soviet lumber industry:

Here I am in charge of socialist construction at the head of the Supreme Economic Council. Lenin trusts me—yet it's so hard working with him! You can never rely on him 100 percent. I go see him, we talk things over, we come to an agreement, he tells me: 'Take the floor and I'll support you." But the moment he senses that the majority is against your proposal, he will betray you. ... Vladimir Ilyich will betray anyone, abandon anything, but all in the name of the revolution and socialism, remaining loyal only to the fundamental idea—socialism, communism.⁴⁸

For Lenin the fundamental idea was embodied in the party, to which he was always loyal. His struggle against the Workers' Opposition, an intra- party grouping which opposed his policies at the Tenth Party Congress, was carried out under the banner of party unity. The mortal sin of the Workers' Opposition was that it objected to the idea of equating the party with the working class and to the party's claim to dictatorial power in the name of the "proletarian vanguard." The Workers' Opposition complained that the working class was the only class "dragging out a miserable existence doing convict labor. "⁴⁹ It called for the trade unions to defend the interests of the workers and for the management of the economy to be turned over to the unions. This was an infringement on the "fundamental idea," the party's monopoly of power.

The monopoly of power did not mean a monopoly by all the members of the party. Lenin was displeased with the membership. In his speech to the Eleventh Party Congress he said: "It must be admitted, and we must not be afraid to admit, that in ninety-nine cases out of one hundred the re­sponsible Communists are not in the jobs they are now fit for, that they are unable to perform their duties, and that they must settle down to learn."⁵⁰ In 1919 Trotsky had referred to the military commissars as a new order of samurai.⁵¹ In 1921 Stalin, following his usual practice, borrowed this idea from his rival, but made it less grandiloquent, more precise and detailed. Stalin described the Communist party as "an order of Teutonic knights within the Soviet state who direct the bodies of the state and inspire their activities."⁵² Both Trotsky and Stalin saw the party as an elite order inspired by a particular idea (Trotsky's commissars were the party's "best elements"), but each chose his metaphor according to his own taste. The fundamental difference between the samurai and the Teutonic knights was that the "dog knights," as Marx called them, forcibly converted the people of an occupied country to the true faith, whereas the samurai lived in their own country.

Developing the parallel between the Communist party and the Knights of the Sword, Stalin emphasized the "importance of the old guard within this mighty order." But he also noted that the old guard had been reinforced since 1917 by new leaders who had been "steeled in the struggle." Thus we see that a year before he was elected general secretary of the Central Committee, Stalin envisaged the party as a conquering order in an occupied country structured along rigorously hierarchical lines.

Soviet society was a hierarchical pyramid with the ruling party at the top. At the bottom was the peasantry; a bit higher, the useful intelligentsia; higher still, the working class; and at the very top, the party boss. In one of the earliest Soviet novels, The Week, written by the Communist novelist Yuri Libedinsky, a Cheka official named Klimin describes an argument he had had with a certain intellectual "over the question of special dining facilities for responsible officials." The intellectual had argued that such facilities should be closed.

His line was that the revolution requires us to stay within the limits of the average ration, even in the case of qualified personnel. But my reasoning is this: We are the revolution; we, who at our meetings call ourselves the leading vanguard. If each of us, besides the pain and work we have to bear, had to go hungry, it would weaken us and put a strain on us, and in that case our vanguard wouldn't last very long. It's pretty simple after all. For them, for revolutionaries, the revolution is something apart from themselves, an idol demanding sacrifices, but as for me... I can say, the way some king did once, "I am the state."⁵³

The same Cheka philosopher had a discussion with a young Communist woman who suggested that words rather than force be used to explain the party's policies to the peasants. This was his response to her:

Talk with them?... They wouldn't understand. As if these hardworking peasants hadn't killed plenty of our propagandists and political activists for no reason except that they preached communism too openly. They don't read our books; they use our newspapers to roll their cigarettes. No, Anyuta, things are much more complicated. We have to reshape their lives. They are savages; they live alongside us but they're still in the Middle Ages; they believe in sorcerers, and to them we're just some special kind of sorcerer.⁵⁴

This young Communist woman, who had not yet been "steeled in the struggle," needed this kind of ideological working over because she had been to Moscow and had seen a stairway in a railway station there

a big set of stairs, full of people from top to bottom. Men, women, children, lying on the stairs surrounded by their miserable filthy things. ... And down this awful stairway, stepping disgustedly and carefully, mostly disgustedly, came an ever so elegant commissar, and his commissar's star was shining on his chest, and ever so carefully among these filthy, tired bodies he placed the tips of his shiny lacquered boots.⁵⁵

This stairway was realistically described by a proletarian writer. It had not yet dawned on him that he should not and must not write this way. The scene on the stairs could serve as a symbol of the young Soviet state.

The party, an order of knights in a conquered country, of sorcerers among savages, could not carry out its functions as master in the land unless it was solidly united, unless it was a docile instrument in the hands of its leaders. The need for unity seemed especially obvious to Lenin during the transition to the NEP. An army requires discipline more than ever when it is retreating. The Tenth Party Congress passed a resolution against the "anarchist and syndicalist deviation," meaning the Workers' Opposition, and another "On Party Unity," which banned factional activity on pain of expulsion.

The resolution on party unity opened a new chapter in the history of the Bolshevik party. It is significant that this resolution, voted in the absence of approximately 200 delegates, who had left the congress to help suppress the Kronstadt revolt and the Antonov movement, remained secret for several years. The authors of the resolution, and all those who voted for it, felt unconsciously that the character of the party was changing. Only Radek, with a sense of foreboding, warned the delegates that one day they might feel its effects on their own necks; but this did not stop him from voting for it. The resolution eliminated the last remnants of the socialist move­ment's traditional democratic principles. The Bolshevik party became a totalitarian party in which loyalty to ideas became intolerable. The sole requirement of members was loyalty to the top leadership, which made all the decisions. The abrupt turn to the NEP became a test of such loyalty. Those who persisted in believing in ideas, who would not accept the "rusty color of the times," were expelled from the party, left it on their own, or committed suicide. On May 20, 1922, Pravda published an obituary for a seventeen-year-old Young Communist who had committed suicide: "He was often heard to say that first of all one must be a Communist and only after that a human being." The young man apparently had not been able to withstand the conflict. The Communist in his soul had not been able to defeat the human being and so killed him. But for many the victory over human feeling came easily.

Two weeks after the October revolution Maxim Gorky wrote: "Lenin, Trotsky, and their comrades have already been affected by the vile poison of power, a fact attested by their shameful attitude toward freedom of speech, individual freedoms, and all those rights for whose triumph democrats have always fought."⁵⁶ Two and a half years later, in early 1921, Aron Solts, a man known as the "conscience of the party," had this to say:

Being in power for a long time in the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat has had a corrupting effect on a significant number of veteran party activists. This is the source of their bureaucratism, their extremely haughty attitude toward rank-and-file party members and toward the unaffiliated mass of workers; this is the source of their extraordinary abuse of their privileged position for their own material advancement. A Communist hierarchical caste has been created and entrenched.⁵⁷

To party official Solts this "Communist hierarchical caste"—or, as Stalin put it, "order of knights"—had developed and taken shape as a result of being in power for a long time. Bukharin, the eminent party theoretician, saw deeper causes: "A certain stratum of Communist cadre could degenerate on the basis of their being the sole authority. ... Our form of government is a dictatorship; our party is the party that dominates the country."⁵⁸

Zinoviev, not having the power of clairvoyance, proclaimed with pride at the Eleventh Congress:

We have a monopoly on legality. We have denied political freedom to our opponents. We do not permit legal existence to those who aspire to become our rivals. ... The dictatorship of the proletariat, as Comrade Lenin has said, is a very harsh thing. In order to assure the victory of the proletarian dictatorship there is no other way than to break the back of all opposition to this dictatorship. ... No one can foresee a time when we will be able to revise our opinion on this question.

The party's unlimited dictatorial power was the main cause of its de­generation. It transformed revolutionaries into veritable feudal lords, and it invited an influx of careerists and fortune hunters. In impotent rage Lenin demanded that corrupt Communists be "tried on the spot and shot, un­conditionally." But it was precisely such people—without any ideals or convictions—who did best as members of a dictatorial party with a mo­nopoly on power. Rosa Luxemburg's predictions were realized to the letter. A few months after the October revolution she had written:

[With] the repression of political life in the land as a whole, life in the Soviets must also become more and more crippled. Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. ... A few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule. Among them, in reality only a dozen outstanding heads do the leading and an elite of the working class is invited from time to time to meetings where they are to applaud the speeches of the leaders, and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously—at bottom, then, a clique af­fair—a dictatorship, to be sure, not the dictatorship of the proletariat, however, but only the dictatorship of a handful of politicians.⁵⁹

One year after the introduction of the NEP, at the Eleventh Party Con­gress, Lenin made a surprising admission. He said the Soviet state was "like a car that was going not in the direction the driver desired, but in the direction someone else desired; as if it were being driven by some mysterious, lawless hand, God knows whose. ... The car is not going in the direction the man at the wheel wanted it to go."⁶⁰ These were the tragic words of a man who believed he had discovered the laws governing the motion of the vehicle of state, who thought he knew the direction in which it was going, but who suddenly discovered that the machine was out of his control. His response was to strengthen the hand at the wheel.

On Lenin's suggestion, the Central Committee that convened after the Eleventh Congress elected Joseph Stalin to a newly created position, that of general secretary. Lenin was confident of Stalin's abilities as a "driver." They had been thoroughly tested during the civil war.

In 1920, in his pamphlet Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder, Lenin ridiculed the debates then going on about the dictatorial character of the Soviet state. To him it was "ridiculous and childish nonsense" to discuss whether there was a dictatorship of the party or of the working class, a dictatorship of the leaders or of the masses. This, he said, was "like discussing whether a man's left leg or right arm is of greater use to him."⁶¹ But he was dissimulating. He knew perfectly well that the right arm was more important and he said as much: 'To object to the necessity of a strong central power, dictatorship, and unity of will... has become impossible."⁶²

The need for a strong right arm was felt especially after the civil war, when the struggles against the countless enemies of the revolution broke out with renewed force. The liberalization of the economy was accompanied by a new wave of terror. This was another "rusty" aspect of the times. In the Land of the NEP and the Cheka was the title of memoirs written by Boris Cederholm, an inmate of the Solovki labor camp and one of the first to escape to the West and tell about it. The NEP and the Cheka were two sides of the same coin in Soviet Russia in the first half of the 1920s.

One initial result of the NEP was a worsening of the situation for the working class, the class with hegemony, as the propagandists loved to say. The workers went on strike out of prerevolutionary habits which had not yet been broken. They demanded better conditions. On December 2, 1923, in a speech to Moscow Communists, Stalin referred to a "wave of strikes and unrest that spread through several regions of our republic in August of this year."⁶³ But workers had also gone on strike in 1921 and 1922. The Smolensk Archive contains numerous reports by GPU agents on the workers' discontent over their miserable wages, late wage payments, food shortages, and the high cost of living, as well as reports on strikes at factories and workshops and on the railroads.⁶⁴ The Smolensk GPU blamed the strikes on anarchist agitation. In Moscow the Mensheviks were blamed.

At the Eleventh Party Congress Aleksandr Shlyapnikov recalled that strikes by workers in Zlatoust and Bryansk had been denounced as the "work of monarchists." Everyone was blamed for strikes—anarchists, Men­sheviks, monarchists—but worst of all, the workers themselves. At the Eleventh Congress Lenin laid the theoretical basis for blaming the Russian proletariat. He said that since "large-scale capitalist industry had been destroyed and the factories and shops had ceased to function, the proletariat had disappeared." Lenin did not hesitate to revise Marx. It was true that Marx had written that those employed at factories and plants constituted the real proletariat and that this had been true of capitalism as a whole for 500 years, but "for Russia today this is not true." In response to this argument Shlyapnikov taunted Lenin: "Allow me to congratulate you on being the vanguard of a nonexistent class."

In June 1953, when the workers of East Berlin went on strike and poured into the streets to protest low wages and high prices, the East German Communist party announced that the people had not justified the confidence placed in them by the party. Bertolt Brecht wrote a poem advising the party to dissolve the people and elect a new one. The Soviet leaders had employed this formula long before Brecht. Having led a revolution in the name of a class that did not exist, they set about creating the kind of class they needed. Contempt for the interests of those who are "not real proletarians" has become a Communist virtue and has been justified "theoretically." Soviet historians have come to the conclusion that the prerevolutionary Russian worker was not a "pure proletarian."⁶⁵

During the discussion of the situation in the party which was permitted for a short time at the end of 1923, many participants complained, "In the eyes of the workers the party cells and many party members always act as defenders of management, of increased production quotas and all kinds of deductions or layoffs. All the Communist party members seem to think it is their duty at all costs to justify every injustice, even the most obvious, to the workers."⁶⁶ If on the other hand certain individual Communists protested against management along with the workers, "our higher party bodies think that such Communists are not reliable."⁶⁷

The most widely used word in official parlance during the NEP was smychka, the "bond" or alliance between the workers and the peasants. The workers supposedly played the leading role in this alliance; they were the embodiment of the dictatorship and of all progress. And yet their conditions deteriorated drastically during this time.

If the workers played the leading role, the peasants played the role of the led. Although they represented the "anarchic petit bourgeois element," their situation began to improve quickly, for agricultural products became the basis of the country's economic revival. Anastas Mikoyan wrote in his memoirs: "1922 was the first year after the revolution when not only the domestic requirement for grain was satisfied but grain began to be exported in substantial quantities."⁶⁸ Mikoyan did not mention that these exports began at a time when the ARA was still feeding millions of starving people, but there is no question that the export of grain (and lumber) in the early 1920s was the only source of foreign currency, which the Soviet republic required in order to engage in foreign trade. The peasantry was the most important economic force in the country, although its political rights were restricted. Posters began to go up appealing to the peasants: 'Turn in your savings for a government loan, backed by gold, and after a while you'll be rich." But the peasants remained second-class citizens, as they were well aware. The Smolensk GPU recorded the moods among the peasantry, for example, a report covering the period May 15—31, 1922:

Among the peasants there are no limits to the grumbling against the Soviet government and the Communists. In the conversation of every middle peasant and poor peasant, not to speak even of the kulak, the following is heard: "They aren't planning freedom for us but serfdom. The time of Boris Godunov has already begun, when the peasants were attached to the landowners. Now we [are attached] to the Jewish bourgeoisie like Modkowski, Aronson, etc."⁶⁹

ASSAULT ON THE HUMAN SPIRIT

Peasant discontent with the Soviet government and the policies of the Communist party increased as persecution of the church intensified. "Strange as it may seem," the religious historian Nikita Struve wrote, "the church was better prepared for revolution than the state."⁷⁰ The process of preparing the church for reform, underway since 1905, culminated in the Holy Synod of 1917, which on November 5 elected Tikhon, the metropolitan of Moscow, to be the new head, or patriarch, of the Russian Orthodox church.

Conflict between the church and the Soviet state was inevitable because the Communist party, after taking power, undertook not only to transform the country economically, socially, and politically but to create a new kind of human being, the "new man." It sought spiritual power. A decree of January 23, 1918, proclaimed the separation of church and state, the confiscation of church property, and the suppression of its legal rights. In effect the church was outlawed. In reply Patriarch Tikhon pronounced an anathema against the open and secret enemies and persecutors of the church and called on the faithful to defend the church. In March 1918 the patriarch emphatically condemned the Brest-Litovsk treaty as a betrayal of commit­ments given to the Russian people and the Allies. On the first anniversary of the October revolution he sent a letter to the Council of People's Com­missars listing the crimes of the new government and calling for the release of prisoners and an end to violence, bloodshed, and the persecution of the faith.

The difficult position the Soviet government found itself in at the time obliged it to modify its anticlerical policy. A December 1918 memorandum by the people's commissar of justice listed certain things that should not be done, although they were being done everywhere, for example, the arbitrary closing of churches, confiscation of religious objects for revolu­tionary use, police raids during church services, the arrest of priests, and the drafting of priests for compulsory labor. Local soviets were urged not to offend the feelings of religious people.⁷¹ This moderation did not last long. In March 1919 the commissar of justice suggested that local author­ities "launch a war against superstition," invade the sanctuaries, take inventories, and subject all relics to scientific examination.

During the civil war Patriarch Tikhon withheld support from either side. Although he granted autonomy to bishops in areas under White control, he refused to place the authority of the church on the side of the Whites.

The famine of 1921 became the occasion for a harsh blow at the church. In August Patriarch Tikhon appealed to the heads of all Christian churches to aid the victims of the famine. A Church Famine Relief Committee was founded, and collections were taken at all churches. The government denied authorization for the church committee and ordered it dissolved. Kuskova recalled the patriarch's "tremendous energy," which "inspired all the faith­ful in Russia and abroad to come to the rescue." This display of energy greatly alarmed the Bolsheviks, she believed. In their eyes "the efforts of the patriarch and of our committee were nothing but an attempt to organize counterrevolution. "⁷²

On February 19, 1922, the patriarch urged the diocesan councils to turn over all church valuables, with the exception of sacred objects, to a fund for famine relief. On February 26 a government decree confiscated all church valuables, including sacred objects. The faithful tried to oppose this confiscation. In the three months that followed, 1,414 bloody clashes between church people and government troops were recorded.⁷³

Resistance by church people in Shuya resulted in the death of four and the wounding of ten. Lenin used this occasion to send a top secret letter to the Politburo demanding total suppression of any further resistance. "This crowd [publika] must now be taught a lesson so that they won't dare even dream of resisting again for years to come."⁷⁴ Lenin gave orders to arrest as many "representatives of the reactionary bourgeoisie and reac­tionary clergy" as possible, to hold a public trial, and have "a very large number" shot.⁷⁵ The trial was held in Moscow in April—May 1922; eleven defendants were sentenced to death. Five were actually executed. Patriarch Tikhon was subpoenaed as a witness and later was named a defendant. He was placed under house arrest and prevented from carrying out his church duties. A related trial in Petrograd in July 1922 involved eighty-six de­fendants, ten of whom were sentenced to death and four executed, including Metropolitan Veniamin. During 1922 a total of 8,100 priests, monks, and nuns were executed.

"Antireligious work" continued unabated, in particular the "exposure of superstition." Items such as the following one in Pravda, August 5, 1922, were common: "Petrograd—On August 2 the investigator for important civil cases, in the presence of clergy and experts, including professors from the Petrograd Medical Institute, examined the relics of [Saint] Alexander Nev- sky. Instead of relics the shrine turned out to contain fragments of bone mingled with rubbish."

The campaign against the church was greatly facilitated by a schism within it. A group of Petrograd clergy, headed by Aleksandr Vvedensky, visited the detained patriarch at his home and asked that they be placed in charge of the patriarchal offices, so that the church "would not be left without a directing body." The patriarch delegated his authority to Met­ropolitan Agafangel of Yaroslavl, but entrusted the patriarchal offices to Vvedensky and his supporters until Agafangel arrived. On May 18, 1922, they carried out a coup, announcing the abolition of the patriarchate and the formation of a "supreme" executive body of the church. This marked the birth of the Living Church, "to which the Soviet government gave its moral, material, and especially political support."⁷⁶ Great hopes were placed in the Living Church. Zinoviev told Vvedensky it seemed to him that "your group could be the starting point for a great movement on an international scale."⁷⁷ The head of the Comintern, who in 1921 had helped to found an international trade union organization, the Profintern (or Red Trade Union International), may have had in mind the formation of a religious inter­national under the leadership of the Bolshevik party. While offering support to the Living Church and holding radiant international prospects up to its leaders, the Soviet authorities reminded them of the other side of the coin. The confirmation of death sentences for five of those condemned in the Moscow trial "was meant not only to sober up the hot-headed counter­revolutionary priests but also to give a lesson in the political ABCs to the new 'supreme' executive body of the church."⁷⁸

From the first day of the revolution, Lenin saw the intelligentsia as the main enemy, a force that would not submit "without lengthy discussions" to the "authority of one man" (as he had said in reference to Sverdlov). There was no need to explain action against members of the intelligentsia who opposed the Soviet government. What needed explanation was per­secution of the neutral strata, which were dangerous because of their in­stinctive kindness, their humane impulses, their compassion for all who were persecuted. In reply to a letter from Gorky objecting to mass arrests in Petrograd, Lenin set forth his credo on November 15, 1919: "In general the arrest of the Cadet public (and those sympathetic to them) is correct and necessary. ... You have spoken unjust and angry words to me. About what? About the fact that a few dozen (or maybe a few hundred) Cadet gentlemen and Cadet sympathizers have to sit in prison for a few days in order to head off conspiracies."⁷⁹ Three days after his letter to Gorky, Lenin repeated his argument almost word for word—after all it was such a good argument—in a letter to Maria Andreeva, Gorky's one-time companion: "In order to head off conspiracies it is impossible not to arrest the entire Cadet and Cadet-sympathetic public. This entire crowd is capable of help­ing the conspirators. It would be criminal not to arrest them."⁸⁰ In this case Lenin had recourse to the terminology of the Slavophiles, who distin­guished between the "people" and the "public," that is, the intelligentsia.

Lenin's term Cadet sympathizer made it possible to disregard the party membership of those who were arrested. The entire Russian intelligentsia as such was subject to accusation. The fact that many of the arrested intellectuals had helped the Bolsheviks before the revolution only com­pounded their guilt. If they had been so kind-hearted before, who could guarantee they would not be again—toward the Bolsheviks' enemies? Lenin came up with a very significant innovation: it was necessary to arrest not only conspirators but those "capable of helping" conspirators. In his view, the entire intelligentsia fell into that category.

One more in a series of blows against the intelligentsia fell in August 1922. On August 28 Izvestia simultaneously published a decree of the Central Executive Committee dissolving the All-Russia Famine Relief Com­mittee and several sensational reports about the discovery of a plot by the so-called Petrograd Military Organization (PMO). "More than 200 people" were arrested in this case.⁸¹ The Cheka lumped together a group of Kronstadt sailors, a group of naval officers, and a group of professors. There is every reason to believe that the PMO affair was fabricated from beginning to end. Even Soviet historians have been unable to reach a consensus on the exact "crimes" of the accused.⁸² Lenin personally directed the preparations for the trial and the trial itself. A large number of Russian scientists and cultural figures were arrested, including the geography professor Tagantsev and the poet Nikolai Gumilev. A number of geologists, together with the Russian Physics and Chemistry Society, petitioned for the release of the detainees. Among those shot in the case, in addition to the "leaders of the conspiracy" and "the most dangerous conspirators," were the chemistry professor M. Tikhvinsky and Gumilev. Appeals to Lenin in behalf of these two were especially strong, because Tikhvinsky, a particularly outstanding chemist, had been a Bolshevik before the revolution, and Gumilev was one of Russia's greatest poets.

After the two were executed certain legends grew up about Lenin's alleged attempt to intercede in their behalf, that his orders to spare them arrived too late, that the Cheka agents had acted on their own. Liberman reports that Leonid Krasin was horrified when he learned that Tikhvinsky had been shot: "They killed him in spite of Lenin's promise,' Krasin exclaimed. 'It can't be. Or maybe he knew everything.... Maybe it's that the revolution has its own inalterable laws. But if that is it, where will it all end? Because, you know, Vladimir Ilyich was very fond of Tikhvinsky, was on a first-name basis with him.'"⁸³ Krasin, who knew Lenin very well, suspected him of knowing everything. Lenin's posthumously published letters include his "resolution" on the Tikhvinsky case: 'Tikhvinsky wasn't arrested by ac­cident. Chemistry and counterrevolution are not mutually exclusive."⁸⁴ When someone approached Dzerzhinsky to ask that Gumilev be pardoned ("Were we entitled to shoot one of Russia's two or three poets of the first order?"), the head of the Cheka replied: "Are we entitled to make an exception of a poet and still shoot the others?"⁸⁵ Chemistry and counter­revolution were not mutually exclusive; neither were poetry and counter­revolution. In fact, both chemistry and poetry seemed counterrevolutionary in and of themselves. Science, poetry, the intelligentsia—all added up to counterrevolution.

The trial of the PMO was the last major trial organized by the Cheka. A decree of February 6, 1922, dissolved the Cheka and transferred its functions to the State Political Administration, better known by its Russian initials GPU. This organization was made part of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) of Soviet Russia. After the formation of the Soviet Union, the GPU became the Unified State Political Administration— OGPU. In one of his novels Ilya Ehrenburg described what two Russian letters pronounced "che" and "ka" had meant:

For any citizen who lived during the revolution, these two syllables which children learned before they learned the word "Mama"—because they were used to frighten children even in the cradle, the way the word bogeyman had once been—two syllables that accompanied the unlucky to their death and even after, to the mass grave; two simple little letters that no one could ever forget.⁸⁶

The two letters pronounced "che-ka" were replaced by three pronounced "gay-pay-oo." Soon these three letters would inspire no less fear than the first two. The appointment of the Cheka head Dzerzhinsky to be head of the GPU and later of the OGPU stressed the unchanging nature and role of the "organs" of repression.

The first big show trial organized by the GPU was the trial of the SRs, which began in June 1922. To Gorky, then living in the West, the trial of the SRs was an act of war against the intelligentsia. Gorky, in a letter to Rykov, which Lenin was to call "Gorky's disgusting letter," described the trial as one in a series aimed at "exterminating the intelligentsia in our illiterate country." The SR trial began just at the time when the verdict in the case of the "concealment of church treasures" was upheld. All of the charges against the SRs had to do with their activities before 1919, for which an amnesty had been declared on February 27, 1919. Twelve of the defendants were sentenced to death, but the sentences were "suspended."

Political trials were only one aspect of the war against the intelligentsia, a battle that was increasing in fury. The Central Committee announced: "In the first months of 1922 a revival of activity has become evident on the part of the former bourgeois intelligentsia. "⁸⁷ The reactivation of "bour­geois ideology" could be seen in the founding of a number of privately owned publishing houses, as permitted by Soviet law, and the reappearance of such magazines as Byloe (The past), Golos minuvshego (Voice of bygone times), Ekonomist, and Pravo i zhizn (Law and life).

"Harmful tendencies" were also evident at a conference of agronomists in March 1922. These professors of agronomy and economics passed a resolution favoring "abstract legality, above classes." People's Commissar of Health Semashko informed Lenin that at a congress of physicians the doctors had "praised the liberal zemstvo tradition in medicine and called for democracy and the right to print a publication of their own." A historian of the Cheka and the GPU states that during this period "anti-Soviet or­ganizations, operating through the intelligentsia (professors, specialists, writers) carried on work among the student youth and among petit bourgeois and philistine elements, establishing bases of support in higher educational institutions, in the press, in literary circles, and in the cooperatives."⁸⁸

In March 1922 Lenin wrote an article "On the Significance of Militant Materialism," in which he said that the "first and foremost duty of a Communist" is to declare "a systematic offensive against bourgeois ideology, philosophical reaction, and all forms of idealism and mysticism." In a letter to GPU head Dzerzhinsky, dated May 19, 1922, Lenin translated these philosophical terms into everyday language. He referred to the intellectuals, the "professors and writers," as "patent counterrevolutionaries, accom­plices of the Entente,... spies and corrupters of the student youth."⁸⁹ Some "professors and writers" were arrested, tried, and shot; others died of hunger. One researcher noted, "In the history of the Russian Academy of Sciences three fatal epidemics seem to have occurred: 1918—1923, 1929- 1931, 1936-1938. A unique feature of the first period was that many prominent Russian scientists and academicians froze or starved to death during that time. The historian cites obituaries published in the newsletter of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The obituary for the historian Lappo- Danilevsky, who died on February 7, 1919, noted: "He is the seventh victim torn from the ranks of full members of the academy since the end of May 1918." That the academy had slightly more than forty members at the time points up the extent of the catastrophe. Prominent scientists and academics continued to die, among them V. A. Zhukovsky, the founder of hydrodynamics and aerodynamics, the respected Orientalist B. A. Turaev, the great mathematician A. M. Lyapunov, the linguist A. A. Shakhmatov, and the theologian I. S. Palmov. In 1921 Lenin signed a decree on the "creation of favorable conditions for scientific work." Its aim was to save the life of Academician Ivan Pavlov, Russia's only Nobel laureate. The need for such a decree was eloquent testimony to the tragic situation in which Russian science found itself.

Lenin, in his May 19 letter to Dzerzhinsky, urged "thorough preparation" for a new method of repression aimed at the intelligentsia: the deportation of "the writers and professors helping the counterrevolution."⁹¹

In May 1922 Lenin also read the draft for the first Soviet penal code. He insisted that it was necessary to "put forward publicly a thesis that is correct in principle and politically correct (not just a narrow juridical thesis) that would explain the essence of terror, its necessity and limits, and the justification for it. The courts must not ban terror—to promise that would be deception or self-deception—but must formulate the motives underlying it, legalize it as a principle plainly, without any make-believe."⁹² He urged that "the application of the death sentence be extended... to all forms of activity by the Mensheviks, SRs, and so on."⁹³ But his main contribution to the science of jurisprudence was the way he formulated the clause on "propaganda or agitation":

Propaganda or agitation which objectively assists that section of the in­ternational bourgeoisie which refuses to recognize the rights of the Communist system of ownership that has superseded capitalism, that section which is striving to overthrow the Communist system by violence, either by means of foreign intervention, blockade, or by espionage, financing the press, and similar means, is an offense punishable by death, which, if mitigating cir­cumstances are proved, may be commuted to deprivation of liberty, or de­portation.⁹⁴

Lenin introduced the concept of objectively aiding the international bourgeoisie. In this way, as the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski put it, Lenin "laid the foundations for the system of law characteristic of to­talitarianism, as opposed to the laws of a despotic system."⁹⁵ In despotism the characteristic feature is the severity of the law. What is characteristic in a totalitarian system is the fictitious nature of the law. Lenin's contri­bution—the death penalty for views which might "objectively aid" the bourgeoisie—meant that the government could kill anyone it wished, any­one it disliked. Or if there were extenuating circumstances, it could send such persons to prison or labor camps or deport them. In reality, then, the law did not exist, nor did the penal code.

The first experiment in applying the new formula was the deportation of a large group of scientists, writers, doctors, and agronomists. On August 31, 1922, Pravda published an article entitled "A First Warning." Noting that "certain strata of the bourgeois intelligentsia have not accepted Soviet power," the newspaper reported that the "most active counterrevolutionary elements" among these strata had been arrested and sent into internal exile "in the northern provinces and some deported from the country" by a decree of the GPU. The deported professionals represented a very broad spectrum ("160 of the most active bourgeois ideologists").⁹⁶ From the few available documents and memoirs it may be gathered that the Politburo decided to strike this blow at the intelligentsia on Lenin's initiative after singling out the most important centers of independent thought which in their opinion had to be paralyzed. Some names were provided (the list of philosophers was drawn up almost entirely by Lenin himself), but for the rest the initiative was left to the GPU and to influential party leaders and their retainers who might have personal scores to settle. The list of the proscribed was drawn up with one central aim in mind: to give the intelligentsia a warning, expelling the main troublemakers and intimidating the rest. This is why the list included some people against whom no complaint had ever been made and left out others who seemed to be prime candidates for deportation.

CHANGING LANDMARKS

Deportation from the country was a drastic measure, but compared to a death penalty handed down at a show trial, it was benign. The Soviet government could not, in 1922, risk shooting one or two hundred of the best-known Russian intellectuals; that might make too unfavorable an impression abroad. Another obstacle to mass execution was the shortage of skilled scientific and cultural personnel, whom the state needed, despite their unreliability.

In July 1921 there occurred an event which opened up new possibilities for the Communist party "on the ideological front" in relation to such skilled personnel. An anthology entitled Smena vekh (Changing landmarks) was published in Prague, giving distinctive shape to a movement that had first begun in the Soviet Republic, gained the active support of the Communist party—because to its members the party was coming to lose its bolshevist substance and to take on a nationalist character—then spread to the emigr6 community.

After the October revolution more than a million people left Russia. The exact number of emigr6s remains unknown. Lenin spoke of "emigr6s num­bering probably from 1,500,000 to 2,000,000. "⁹⁷ An emigr6 Russian his­torian refers to approximately a million.⁹⁸ A recent Soviet historian gives the figure 860,000." According to statistics published by the League of Nations in 1926, 1,160,000 people left Russia after the revolution. Ap­proximately one fourth were officers and soldiers of the White armies, including about 100,000 in Wrangel's army evacuated from the Crimea to Constantinople. Civilian emigr6s came from all classes and professions, but especially from those the Soviet government considered inimical. A substantial number of the emigres were from the intelligentsia. All political parties were represented, from the extreme right to the extreme left, from the monarchists to the Socialist Revolutionaries and anarchists. The varied political complexion of the emigr6 community was convincing proof that political life inside Soviet Russia had been stifled. All political parties other than the Communist party ended up in the anti-Soviet camp, some willingly, others driven to that position by the one-party dictatorship.

The emigres had been dispersed to all parts of the world (Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Poland, Germany, Latvia, France, China). A great many believed they would soon return to their homeland, that the Bolsheviks were on the verge of collapse. However, defeatist tendencies also arose among the emigr6s and were reinforced from within Soviet Russia. 'The 'changing landmarks⁹ trend [smenovekhovstvo] began to appear among the old intelligentsia inside the Soviet Republic as early as 1918," one Soviet historian has noted.¹⁰⁰ There are many similarities between the policies of the Soviet government toward priests who were willing to risk a schism in order to collaborate with the regime and its policies toward those members of the intelligentsia who were willing to make peace with the conquerors.

In the spring of 1920, after the Polish invasion of the Soviet Republic, patriotism became respectable again and provided the basis for the initial conception of "a change of landmarks" (that is, a reorientation). That summer a certain Professor Gredeskul, a former leader of the Cadet party and a noted legal expert, went on a nationwide speaking tour, with the approval and support of the authorities. He then wrote a series of articles for Izvestia based on his lectures. His main argument was as follows:

It becomes clearer every day that we are not facing a dead end of history or an accidental episode but a broad, smooth, well-lighted road down which the historical process is moving. And this process, which is being guided this time by the conscious efforts of far-sighted leaders, is taking us toward the greatest transformation ever seen in human history.¹⁰¹

The idea of a change of orientation arose spontaneously among the emigres as well as being influenced by Gredeskul and his supporters. It was also in the spring of 1920 that E. A. Efimovsky, the editor of Slavyanskaya zarya (Slavic dawn), an emigre newspaper published in Prague, voiced the opinion that the Bolsheviks were defending the national interest of the Russian state. In one of his articles he spoke of an inevitable conflict between Europe and Soviet Russia. "In this conflict we will be on the side of Soviet Russia. Not because it is Soviet but because it is Russia."¹⁰² In

Paris a dramatist named Klyuchnikov gave a reading of his play Ediny kust (which might be rendered "From a Single Bush"). Among the guests were a number of leading Russian writers: Ivan Bunin, Aleksandr Kuprin, Alek- sei Tolstoy, Mark Aldanov, and Ilya Ehrenburg, who had recently fled from the Crimea.¹⁰³ They all agreed on the play's deficiencies. Kuprin said it was dull as khaki; Tolstoy, that it was mediocre as a rusty nail. But the important thing, said Tolstoy, was the idea behind it. The theme of the play was that "the motherland is all one bush, and its many shoots, including those that grow crooked or off to the side, are fed by the same vital juices." Tolstoy drew a conclusion: "Back there in Russia the harsh wind of rejection is blowing, but here in the West there is nothing but decay, hopeless, narrow-minded materialism, and total demoralization."¹⁰⁴

In the fall of 1920 a collection of articles was published in Harbin, a center of Russian emigration in Manchuria. Its author was Nikolai Ustryalov and it was entitled The Struggle for Russia. This book contained the essence of what was to be the changing landmarks ideology. When the anthology bearing that title actually appeared in Prague in July 1921, it provided a name for the movement but introduced nothing essentially new in com­parison to Ustryalov's contributions of 1920.

Nikolai Ustryalov, a talented writer who emerged as the chief ideologist of the new movement, dedicated The Struggle for Russia "to General Bru- silov, a courageous and loyal servant of Great Russia, both in its hour of glory and in its troubled times of suffering and misfortune." On May 30, 1920, during the Polish invasion, Brusilov had published an appeal in Pravda urging his readers to forget "selfish feelings of class struggle" and to remember instead "their own native Russian people" and their homeland "Mother Russia." To Ustryalov Brusilov's action seemed the model of gen­uine patriotism.

Ustryalov argued in his book that the defeat of the White armies had to be recognized. It was time for the defeated to make their obeisance, to go to Canossa. He called on Wrangel, who was still holding out in the Crimea, to "convert" voluntarily, to accept "the other faith" and hail the example of Brusilov.¹⁰⁵ The Russian intelligentsia, Ustryalov held, fought against bolshevism for many reasons, but its nationalist motives were the main ones.¹⁰⁶ The intelligentsia had opposed the revolution because it was de­stroying the state, causing the army to fall apart and bringing humiliation to the motherland. Without this nationalist inspiration, Ustryalov felt, the struggle against the Bolsheviks would have been senseless and would not have occurred.

The defeat of the White armies, said Ustryalov, had opened his eyes.

He confessed that, along with most of the Russian intelligentsia, he had misjudged bolshevism. Ustryalov's new outlook could be reduced to three points. First, the Russian revolution had in essence been a nationalist one. Its roots went back to the Slavophiles, the pessimism of Chaadaev, Herzen's revolutionary romanticism, and Pisarev's utilitarianism. Among its ances­tors were Chernyshevsky, the Jacobinism of Tkachev, Dostoevsky, the Rus­sian Marxism of the 1890s, "which was led by those whom today we consider the exponents of the authentic Russian idea—Bulgakov, Berdyaev, and Peter Struve,"¹⁰⁷ Maxim Gorky, the followers of Vladimir Soloviev, Andrei Bely, and Alexander Blok. This nationalist revolution had "been fueled by a quintessentially Russian 'blind revolt, senseless and merciless.'" Us- tryalov saw a certain justice in this elemental outbreak but suggested that the revolution had done its job and it was time to stop. Only bolshevism, "despite all its shortcomings, its painful and somber practices," was able to do what the old Russian nationalist theoretician Konstantin Leontiev had advocated: "to freeze the disintegrating power of the revolutionary flood- waters."¹⁰⁸

It was Ustryalov's belief that the Soviet government had now frozen the revolution and was proceeding to carry out the country's national tasks. This was the second point in his new theory. The Bolsheviks had turned out not to be anarchists, as everyone feared, but statists, supporters and builders of a strong state. Only the Bolsheviks, said Ustryalov, as the third point in his program, "are capable of restoring Russia as a great power."¹⁰⁹ By this he meant restoring the Russian empire. Ustryalov was an uncon­ditional supporter of "Russia one and indivisible." He was convinced that "Bolshevik centralism" was tainted only on the surface with the demagogy of "free self-determination for the peoples."¹¹⁰ It was in the interest of this revived Russian state that the struggle against bolshevism cease. In the name of empire Ustryalov condemned the peasant revolts, "the blindly destructive anarchistic wave," which if victorious could transform "great Russia into a hodgepodge of 'liberated nationalities'—an 'independent Si­beria' in the east, a 'self-governing Ukraine' and a 'free Caucasus' in the south, a 'greater Poland' and a dozen 'lesser' nationalities in the west."¹¹¹ The national destiny of the Russian revolution was so evident to Ustryalov that he categorically denied any foreign inspiration:

Even if it were mathematically proven that 90 percent of the Russian rev­olutionaries were foreigners, mainly Jews, that would not in the least disprove the purely Russian character of the movement. Even if alien hands lent themselves to the cause, the soul of the revolution, its inner nature, for better or for worse, remains authentically Russian, proceeding from the ideas of the intelligentsia and refracted through the psyche of the people.¹¹²

Ustryalov displayed great perspicacity. In the Soviet state of Lenin's time he detected many traits that later would become characteristic of the Sta­linist Soviet Union. He saw what many of the Bolshevik leaders did not. The source of his clairvoyance was his certainty of an exact parallel between the Russian and French revolutions. 'The transition from a revolutionary situation to a normal statesmanlike condition will occur not in spite of or in opposition to the revolution but through it."¹¹³ He was convinced that in Russia the evolution from radicalism to empire that had been seen in France would inevitably recur. To him the summer of 1920 was the coming of the Consulate, and the battles with Poland were like Napoleon's victories at Arcole and Marengo. The next step in the process would be the naming of an emperor.

Ustryalov's method of historical analogy enabled him to foresee certain features of the rising Soviet state. At the same time it led him into gross error. He saw the revolution as an invigorating and renewing force (and predicted a rebirth of Russian literary and cultural achievements that never came).¹¹⁴

Vasily Shulgin, in concluding a book on the defeat of the Whites and the White exodus from Russia, expressed a self-consoling thought that in many respects coincided with Ustryalov's views:

Our ideas have crossed the front lines and conquered our enemies' con­sciousness. . . . Let us suppose that the Reds only think they are fighting for the glory of the International... and in fact are shedding their blood, however unconsciously, for nothing other than the restoration of the "Divinely Pro­tected Sovereign State of Russia."... If this is the case, it means that the "White idea," having crossed the battlelines, has conquered their subcon­scious minds. ... We have foreced them to serve the White cause with Red hands. ... We have triumphed. ... the White idea has been victorious.¹¹⁵

The changing landmarks movement arose among the right-wing, con­servative sectors of the Russian intelligentsia. Efimovsky was a monarchist, Ustryalov and Klyuchnikov supporters of Kolchak, Shulgin a monarchist, and Gredeskul a right-wing Cadet. They all "changed their landmarks" when they came to the conclusion that the White cause was being served by Red hands. The ideologists of this movement were adherents of such conservative thinkers as Konstantin Leontiev and Joseph de Maistre. They accepted bolshevism because the idea of liberty, so crucial to the left-wing intelligentsia, was a secondary matter to them.

The turn to the New Economic Policy seemed to be a confirmation of the changing landmarks point of view. In November 1921 Ustryalov wrote: "Before our very eyes the tactical 'degeneration of bolshevism' is occurring as we have consistently predicted for more than a year and a half."¹¹⁶ To Ustryalov and his supporters there was no question that bolshevism was degenerating. In an article entitled 'The Radish" he argued that Soviet Russia was "Red on the outside, White on the inside." Symbols of this "radishness" were the "Red flag waving on top of the Winter Palace and notes of the Internationale being played on the bells of the Kremlin tow­ers."¹¹⁷ The changing landmarks supporters took up the term national bolshevism, which had originated in 1919 in Germany, suggested as an ideology for the Russian intelligentsia after the "elimination of the White movement in its only serious and promising form from the point of view of the state (Kolchak and Denikin)."¹¹⁸ The liberal theorist Peter Struve had polemicized against the advocates of national bolshevism. Struve's funda­mental error, as Ustryalov saw it, was that he confused bolshevism and communism. Bolshevism was a Russian phenomenon; communism was internationalist and therefore alien to Russia. The changing landmarks supporters hoped that the revolution would adapt to the national interests of Russia and accomplish what the weak tsarist regime had been unable to. It seemed to them that events confirmed their hopes.

"The ideology of reconciliation has become a firmly established part of the history of the Russian revolution," Ustryalov asserted.¹¹⁹ In the early 1920s the changing landmarks ideology of reconciliation was sharply crit­icized in emigr6 circles and often indignantly condemned as treason. But it had an effect. According to official data, from 1921 to 1931, 181,432 emigr6s returned to Russia, between 10 and 12 percent of all who had left. In 1921 alone 121,843 returned.¹²⁰ In other words, the overwhelming ma­jority were repatriated during the first year of the NEP, which was also the first year of the openly proclaimed changing landmarks movement. The chief practical significance of that movement for the Soviet government, however, lay elsewhere: it divided the intelligentsia, the greater part of which had either actively opposed the October revolution or passively refused to accept it. The changing landmarks movement was the equivalent among the intelligentsia of the Living Church. In both movements sincere individuals worked alongside direct Soviet government agents, believing that they were acting in Russia's interest, that the Kremlin towers would digest and expel the Red flags waving above them, or, as Ustryalov said, "The Red flag will blossom forth in the national colors."¹²¹

The Soviet press greeted Changing Landmarks enthusiastically. Izvestia discussed it in an article entitled "A Psychological Breakthrough": 'The essence of all the articles in the anthology comes down to the acceptance of the October revolution and the renunciation of all struggle against its results."¹²² Izvestia was surprised at the extent to which "people who just yesterday were fighting against toiling Russia, arms in hand, have now managed to understand its spirit and historic mission." Pravda greeted the anthology with an editorial entitled "A Sign of the Times."¹²³ The anthology was reprinted on Soviet presses. Lenin talked about it. Trotsky at the Second Congress of Political Educators in October 1921 insisted: "Every province must have at least one copy of this book." The topic was also discussed at the Eleventh and Twelfth congresses of the Soviet Communist party.

The changing landmarks tendency was used above all to disrupt the emigration. For many years, the Soviet authorities would consider the mere existence of an organized and hostile emigration a serious danger. The struggle against the emigration would be waged with the help of the GPU and ideology. Having created the provocateur "Trest monarchist organi­zation," the GPU would play a successful game from 1921 to 1927, creating dissension first of all within the monarchist emigr6 organizations and leading foreign intelligence services by the nose. The changing landmarks ideas penetrated broad segments of the emigration; they later became an important component of the ideology of "return to the homeland" and a basic element in the Eurasian movement.

Ustryalov was rather disconcerted by Pravdas compliments and in reply to "A Sign of the Times" wrote that the authors of Changing Landmarks were by no means "five minutes from being Communists."¹²⁴ Nevertheless, the logic of reconciliation forced the changing landmarks supporters, who believed that they could become a loyal opposition, equal partners in a dialog with the Bolsheviks, to do such things as approve the terror, approve the deportation of "thinking people" from the country, and welcome the birth of the GPU. The GPU was welcomed because it was replacing the "notorious Cheka." Terror was welcomed because "it was necessary to freeze hearts with fear in order to paralyze the enemy's will and restore discipline in the army and among the unbridled masses. To this end all means are good and all hands acceptable."¹²⁵ Deportation was justified because "at the present time a purely organic process is underway in Russia, in which the tissues of the state are being reconstituted. The country's 'brain' must not interfere in any way with this process during this period of time (which cannot by necessity last very long)."¹²⁶

Perhaps the most important practical result of the changing landmarks movement was that it provided an ideology for the intelligentsia remaining in the country and for the bureaucratic apparatus, which was growing with spectacular speed. When Lenin returned to work in 1922 after several months' illness he discovered with horror that the Council of People's Commissars in his absence had created 120 committees. In his estimation 16 would have been enough. The nationalization of industry and the system of requisitioning and distributing food had led to a vast increase in the number of officials. Since most of them were totally untrained, it was necessary to staff each post with several persons, swelling the apparatus still further. In 1917 there were nearly 1 million functionaries; in 1925, 2.5 million. The transportation system employed 815,000 people in 1913; in 1921 the number had grown to 1,229,000, although utilization of the system had declined to one fifth of its 1913 volume. In 1913 civil servants were only 6.4 percent of the work force; in 1920 they were 13.5 percent. For the most part people went to work in Soviet government offices out of necessity, in order to receive a ration. The changing landmarks movement provided them with an ideological rationalization.

In September 1922 Pravda published the results of a statistical survey among 230 engineers and staff members of Soviet government offices and industrial "trusts." To the question, "What is your attitude toward the Soviet government?" the answer of 12 was "hostile" and of 46 "indifferent"; 34 gave no answer; 28 said "sympathetic"; and 110 said they were changing landmarks supporters. Their answer to the second question helps to explain the appeal of the changing landmarks ideology. The question had to do with the future prospects of the Soviet Republic: 34 had no definite opinion; another 34 did not answer; 68 answered that the consolidation of state capitalism would lead to the victory of communism; and 94 foresaw the collapse of state capitalism and a return to the previous capitalist system.¹²⁷ That was how the changing landmarks message was understood, that the Bolshevik government would reestablish a strong state and then remove itself from the scene or be transformed.

The changing landmarks movement gave new legitimacy to the Bolsheviks by presenting them as authentic heirs of the Russian historical tradition. This justified the methods used by the new government. In commemoration of the seventh anniversary of the October revolution, Ustryalov commented approvingly: "Across the limitless plains of Russia an idea is spreading far and wide—Konstantin Leontiev's slogan, dormant until now: 'We must rule without shame.'"¹²⁸ Although the changing landmarks ideology legitimized the Bolshevik nationalities policy, it did so too openly, too much "without shame." When Ustryalov wrote, 'The Soviet government will naturally try as quickly as possible to incorporate into the 'proletarian revolution' those petty states which have now erupted like a rash upon the body of the former Russian empire," this was certain to cause indignation among the Com­munist leaders of the national minorities. At the Eleventh Party Congress in 1922 the Ukrainian Communist Nikolai Skrypnik demanded that the changing landmarks supporters within the government apparatus be given a firm official rebuff: "Russia one and indivisible, the past slogan of Denikin and Wrangel, is now the slogan of all these changing landmarks people. Professor Ustryalov is also an advocate of this slogan." At the Twelfth Party Congress Stalin complained that the "great power ideas of the changing landmarks people are filtering all through the party," that the party was falling under the hypnotic spell of "Great Russian chauvinism."¹²⁹

The penetration of these ideas into the government apparatus and into the party was particularly harmful, from Lenin's point of view, for in 1921 and 1922 a debate was on within the party leadership over the future form and structure of the Soviet state.

AN INDISSOLUBLE UNION

After the civil war it became necessary to establish a constitutional basis for normal relations between the various Soviet republics. The Russian Republic, the RSFSR, occupied 92 percent of the territory and was in­habited by 70 percent of the population of the future Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The remaining territory was occupied by the Union republics: the Ukraine, Byelorussia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, the Far Eastern Republic, with its capital at Chita, and the two "people's republics" of Khorezm and Bukhara.

On September 20, 1920, the RSFSR and Azerbaijan signed a treaty which became the prototype for all future treaties between the RSFSR and other Soviet republics. The two sides agreed to a close military, financial, and economic union. The treaty provided for the unification in the shortest possible time of the armed forces and the military commands of both republics, as well as the agencies in charge of foreign trade, the domestic economy, supply, rail and water transport, postal and telegraph services, and finance. Azerbaijan was the weakest and poorest of the Soviet republics. The Ukraine, on the other hand, was the strongest and the most stubborn defender of its sovereign rights. The treaty signed with the Ukraine in December 1920 left substantially greater powers in its hands. The Ukrainian Republic's commissariats of war, foreign trade, finance, labor, and posts and telegraph and its Supreme Economic Council were merged with the central government of the new union, but the Ukraine retained a number of commissariats, in particular a commissariat of foreign affairs, which had the right to enter into diplomatic relations with other countries.

The treaties between the RSFSR and the other Soviet republics created a paradoxical situation. Each republic had the formal right to conduct its own foreign policy but in practice was denied the right to pursue an in­dependent domestic policy. Moscow constantly violated the treaties by intervening unceremoniously in the internal affairs of the republics. The Communists of the Ukraine and Georgia sharply protested these intrusions. Moscow's constant conflicts with Kiev and Tiflis clearly showed the inad­equacies of the system of bilateral treaties among the Soviet republics. Soviet Russia's full emergence upon the international scene (in connection with the Genoa conference in the spring of 1922) made it more necessary than ever that relations between the center and the outlying regions be normalized, and in August 1922 the Central Committee established a com­mission to draft a new Soviet constitution, in part to resolve these issues.

The only anti-Soviet nationalist movement that had not been crushed during the civil war was the Basmachi movement of Central Asia (then called Turkestan). This movement gained new strength in the aftermath of the Red Army takeover of Bukhara in September 1920. After a brief period of collaboration with the Communists, the Young Bukhara movement turned against them. In the fall of 1921 the situation in Turkestan was further complicated by the appearance of Enver Pasha. Formerly a leader of the Young Turks in Turkey, Enver had been minister of war under Sultan Abdul Hamid during World War I. After Kemal Ataturk came to power in Turkey (in 1920), Enver declared himself a supporter of the Communists, as did a number of other Young Turk leaders. He drafted a memorandum for the Congress of the Peoples of the East, held in Baku in September 1920, offering his services in the fight against "Western imperialism."

In the fall of 1921 the Soviet authorities sent Enver to Central Asia. Their aim was to exploit his popularity among the Muslims to help suppress the Basmachi movement. After arriving in Bukhara, Enver decided to turn against the Communists, join the native rebels, and attempt to unite them under his leadership. After some initial successes in combat against Red Army units he sent an ultimatum to Moscow in May 1922 demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops from Turkestan and promising in return to support Communist activities in the Middle East. Enver's death in battle in August 1922, the rivalries among the various Basmachi groups, and the reforms carried out in 1922 by the Turkestan Bureau of the Central Com­mittee (the return of waqf lands, lands held in usufruct, to the Muslim clergy, permission to reopen Muslim religious schools, and recognition of Islamic religious law, the sharia) were all instrumental in suppressing the Basmachi movement.

Once the civil war was over, nationalist movements in the Soviet republics took on the new form of Communist nationalism.

The organizational structure and centralist principles of the Communist party required a centralized state. When Skrypnik complained at the Elev­enth Party Congress about the changing landmarks elements in the party who dreamed of restoring "Russia one and indivisible," one of the delegates shouted from the floor: 'The party, one and indivisible." Indeed, it could be said that the primary goal of the party's founder was exactly that: a party, one and indivisible. The party mission was, in Lenin's view, to express class interests, not national interests. But after the party came to power it unavoidably began to express the interests of the Russian state above all. Lenin assumed that Russia would be a torch to light the fire of world revolution. The larger and more powerful the torch, the hotter it would burn and the quicker the flames would spread.

The Russian Communist party was itself multinational, but its compo­sition did not reflect exactly the country's ethnic diversity. In 1922 it had 375,901 members, of which 270,409 were Russian, that is, 72 percent. In addition there were 22,078 Ukrainians, 19,564 Jews, 9,512 Latvians, 7,378 Georgians, 6,534 Tatars, 5,649 Poles, 5,534 Byelorussians, 4,964 Kirghiz, 3,828 Armenians, 2,217 Germans, 2,043 Uzbeks, 1,964 Eston­ians, 1,699 Ossetians, and 12,528 of other nationalities.¹³⁰ What is most striking about these figures is the overwhelming predominance of Russians in the party. Besides that, the substantial number of Jews is noteworthy. In February 1917 Jews were granted equal rights, and during the revolution and civil war they were active in large numbers on both the Red side and the White. All this resulted in a new explosion of anti-Semitism. Pogroms against Jews were a common feature of the civil war. No less than 100,000 Jews were killed in these pogroms.

On the nationality question the Jewish, Latvian, Polish, and Estonian Communists were usually the most extreme advocates of centralism and the most ardent defenders of a "Russia one and indivisible." Lenin re­marked that "people of other nationalities who have become Russified" (a reference to the Georgians Stalin and Ordzhonikidze and the Pole Dzer- zhinsky) always "overdo it with respect to the 'truly Russian' frame of mind."¹³¹ The Communists of the smaller republics became the chief op­ponents of renascent "Great Russian chauvinism." The stronger the national Communist party, the greater its resistance to this reviving trend. Moreover, the Ukrainian and Georgian Communist parties were acting as Communist parties normally do, that is, demanding total power for themselves.

National Communist views were expressed most strongly by Nikolai Skrypnik. A Ukrainian, he had joined the Marxist movement in 1897 and after 1903 sided with Lenin. From 1900 on he had lived in St. Petersburg and Siberia. It was not until 1918 that he returned to the Ukraine, on Lenin's insistence: "We don't need just any Ukrainian; what we need is Skrypnik."¹³² Lenin was convinced that this veteran Bolshevik would defend Moscow's views against both the local nationalists and the "nihilists" who denied the importance of nationality. Skrypnik justified Lenin's confidence, working first with the Cheka and then, in 1920, assuming the post of Ukrainian commissar of internal affairs.

During 1922 and 1923 Skrypnik became one of the sharpest critics of the Russian party's nationalities policy. Particularly noteworthy was his criticism of Stalin's views on the national question in June 1923 at the Fourth Conference of the Central Committee with Responsible Officials of the National Republics and Regions. He spoke of the party's failure to carry out its nationalities program, citing in particular its inability or re­luctance to combat the rise of Great Russian chauvinism within its own party apparatus as well as among government officials.

The June 1923 conference on nationality issues was held specifically to deal with the question of "Sultan-Galievism," the first "national deviation" to be suppressed by the party. A Tatar from the Volga region, Sultan-Galiev had joined the Bolsheviks before the revolution. In 1918 he became a member of the leading body (collegium) of the People's Commissariat of Nationalities, headed by Stalin. Sultan-Galiev dealt with matters concerning the Muslim peoples and was in charge of the Central Muslim Military Collegium. He played a major role in Bolshevik efforts to win over the Muslims of the former Russian empire, in particular helping to organize a "Muslim Socialist Army," to whose Red banners Lenin and Trotsky urged all Muslims rally.

Sultan-Galiev viewed the October revolution as an opportunity for the Tatars to realize their national aspirations. He dreamed of a Tatar-Bashkir Republic and the unification of all the Muslim peoples of the former tsarist empire into a new, powerful state of their own. In the fall of 1919 he published a series of articles in the magazine Zhizn natsionalnostei (The life of the nationalities), organ of the Commissariat of Nationalities, pre­senting his concept of world revolution. The weak link in the capitalist chain was not the West but the East, and the Communists should direct their efforts accordingly. But the Eastern peoples did not have an industrial proletariat; therefore different methods would have to be employed to arouse their revolutionary enthusiasm. Above all, Muslim activists should be uti­lized to spread communism in the East.

For Sultan-Galiev the transition to the NEP and the rise of the changing landmarks ideology were signs that his hopes had been misplaced. He came to the conclusion that the "German model" of Marxism could not meet the needs of the colonial peoples. He wrote a series of articles prefiguring the ideology of Islamic socialism. He advocated the formation of a "Colonial International" independent of the Comintern and based on an alliance of the workers and peasants in each colonial country with the native petit bourgeoisie and even progressive elements of the grand bourgeoisie.

Sultan-Galiev foresaw five stages in the realization of his ideas: (1) the formation of a Muslim Communist state in the central Volga region; (2) the incorporation into this state of all the Turkish peoples, followed by (3) all the other Muslim peoples of the former Russian empire; (4) the creation at first of an Asian International and then of an international embracing all the colonial peoples; and finally (5) the establishment of the political hegemony of the colonial and semicolonial countries over the industrialized metropolitan centers.

Sultan-Galiev was arrested in the spring of 1923. For the first time the political police were brought into a dispute among Communists, and for the first time a prominent party figure was arrested for his views. At the June 1923 conference on nationality questions Stalin explained the reasons for the arrest of his former associate in the Commissariat of Nationalities. The GPU had allegedly intercepted secret, seditious correspondence by Sultan-Galiev.¹³³ The Tatar dissident was freed not long after his first arrest but was rearrested in 1929. He died in the 1930s at a time and place unknown. The term Sultan-Galievism continued to be used as a weapon against all nationalist deviations and was among the charges brought against the defendants in the Moscow trials of 1936—1938. The arrest of Sultan- Galiev and the condemnation of Sultan-Galievism in the summer of 1923 was for Stalin a way of avenging a defeat he had suffered earlier on the question of the draft constitution for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

In August 1922 the commission assigned by the Central Committee to draft a constitution for a union of the Soviet republics and headed by Stalin came up with a draft proposing the "autonomization" of the other Soviet republics; that is, they should all become part of the RSFSR but retain their "autonomy" within it. The first clause in this "Draft Resolution on Relations Between the RSFSR and the Independent Republics" proposed: 'That a treaty be concluded between the Soviet republics of the Ukraine, Byelorussia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, and the RSFSR concerning the formal incorporation of the former into the RSFSR, leaving open the question of Bukhara, Khorezm, and the Far Eastern Republic."¹³⁴

Lenin categorically opposed Stalin's "autonomization" plan. He regarded it as a crude and undisguised violation of the party's nationalities policy and of its central principle, the right of nationals to self-determination. In his view it would provoke major conflicts that could only weaken the Soviet cause. On October 6, 1922, the Central Committee approved a new draft rewritten along lines favored by Lenin, entitled, "On the Relations Between the Sovereign United Republics." Its first clause stated: "It is deemed necessary that a treaty be concluded between the Ukraine, Byelorussia, the Federation of Transcaucasian Republics, and the RSFSR unifying them into a single Union of Socialist Soviet Republics while reserving to each the right to secede freely from this Union."¹³⁵

Lenin's "federalization" plan won out over Stalin's "autonomization." But in the meantime Stalin had succeeded in partially neutralizing the Cau­casian republics, especially Georgia, by pushing through the formation of the Transcaucasian Federation, which was placed under the authority of the Transcaucasian Bureau (Zakburo) of the party, headed by Ordzhoni­kidze, the conqueror of Georgia and one of Stalin's cronies. The discussion that followed the Central Committee's approval of Lenin's plan showed that even "federalization" did not receive support everywhere, because it did not guarantee genuine sovereignty. While the constitution of the USSR was being worked out, the Central Committee's position was frequently criti­cized.¹³⁶

The nationality question was discussed freely for the last time at the Twelfth Party Congress in April 1923. Lenin had been impaired by illness through much of 1922. Nevertheless, at the end of 1922 and the beginning of 1923 he made preparations for an open attack on Stalin and his henchmen at the upcoming party congress, intending to call for a sharp condemnation of their actions. To Lenin, Ordzhonikidze's behavior in Georgia was evi­dence of a severe crisis in the party over the nationality question. In the heat of an argument Ordzhonikidze, the representative of the Russian party's Central Committee, had slapped a member of the Central Committee of the Georgian Communist party. Lenin did not wish to look at the real reason for the failure of the party's nationalities policy, it being the inevitable result of a state where autocratic power was in the hands of a dictatorially centralized party.

For Lenin the "intrigues of the class enemy" were behind the conflict, the "bourgeois elements" that were filling up and defiling the state appa­ratus. The countermeasures that Lenin wished to present to the Twelfth Party Congress amounted to nothing more than the strengthening of the party's control over the machinery of state and government officialdom. However, Ordzhonikidze himself was a leading member of the party's in­stitutions of control. Lenin intended to propose other measures as well, including a "code of conduct" for Communists assigned to work in areas populated by minority nationalities. All of these measures were aimed directly against Stalin, but Lenin's illness prevented him from speaking at the congress. He entrusted all his materials on the nationality question to

Trotsky, asking him to speak against Stalin in defense of the Georgian Communists and to present Lenin's view.

Trotsky could not make up his mind to speak at the congress. It was Rakovsky, one of Trotsky's closest collaborators, who spoke against Stalin's policy. He warned that unless the necessary corrections were made, the mishandling of the nationality question could lead to a civil war. Stalin refuted the arguments of all his critics with little effort. As ever, he stood firmly on Marxist principles. He defended a strong, centralized state and the leading role of the party in all spheres of life. He pointed out that the political base of the proletarian dictatorship was necessarily located in the central industrial regions, not in the outlying areas, with their predomi­nantly peasant population. In other words, the Russian Republic had to have primacy over the national republics. Stalin supported his arguments with numerous quotations from Lenin. He questioned Lenin's argument that it was better to be overly indulgent toward the national minorities than to overdo things in the opposite direction. Stalin argued that it was never good to overdo.

On July 6, 1923, the Central Executive Committee formally approved the Constitution of the USSR. On January 31, 1924, ten days after Lenin's death, the constitution was ratified by the Eleventh Congress of Soviets.

In September 1924 the people's republics of Khorezm and Bukhara "dissolved themselves" and were absorbed by the Uzbek, Turkmen, and Tadzhik republics. Earlier, in November 1922, the Far Eastern Republic had "dissolved itself" to join the RSFSR.

The Constitution of the USSR did not go into effect until 1924, but the fundamental principles of Soviet nationalities policy, the principles of the centralized Soviet state, had been laid down long before. Zinoviev expressed them clearly and concisely as early as 1919, when he proclaimed the natural resources of the non-Russian republics—Azerbaijani cotton and Turkestani cotton, for example—indispensable to the new state. Unlike their prede­cessors, however, the Soviets would be imparting civilization when they came.

LENIN'S MANTLE

On May 25—26, 1922, Lenin suffered a stroke. His right side was paralyzed and he lost the power of speech. Not until October 2 did he gradually begin to resume work. On December 13 a second stroke put him almost entirely out of commission. From then until March 9, 1923, when a third stroke turned him into a living corpse (that survived for another eleven months), Lenin could do nothing more than think, dictate his thoughts for a few minutes each day, and hope that his advice would be taken by his cohorts and disciples.

Lenin used those last weeks of conscious life for a desperate effort to work out some formulas that he hoped would cure the serious disorders he had discovered in the party and the state after he had fallen ill. When he saw that his own death was imminent and inevitable, he offered his last advice on how he should be replaced as head of the party and the state. The struggle for Lenin's mantle, to use the expression common at the time, began with the first signs of his illness. The structure of the party's governing bodies limited the number of candidates. Formally speaking, the highest body of the party was its congress, which was held once a year every year from 1917 through 1925. Between congresses the party was led by the Central Committee. In 1919 a Political Bureau (better known by its short form, Politburo) was elected for the first time. Power within the party was concentrated in the Politburo. At the same time there existed a Secretariat, in charge of day-to-day affairs, and an Organization Bureau, the Orgburo, which handled organizational matters.

On April 3, 1922, in the aftermath of the Eleventh Party Congress, a new Politburo was elected, consisting of Lenin, Kamenev, Trotsky, Stalin, Zinoviev, Rykov, and Tomsky. Bukharin, Molotov, and Kalinin were elected as alternate members of this top leadership body. The youngest of them all, Bukharin, was thirty-four. Stalin was forty-three and Trotsky forty-two. The dying Lenin had just turned fifty-two.

A Soviet poet, Nikolai Aseev celebrated October with the words: "Long live the revolution that has thrown down the power of the old." The old rulers who had been "thrown down" were really not that old; the century was still young. The leaders of the Bolshevik party, on the other hand, were middle-aged men who expected to live for a long time.

Lenin himself limited the number of those who aspired to his mantle or to a share of it. In his "Letter to the Congress," which he dictated from December 23 to December 25, 1922, and which is commonly called Lenin's Testament, he wrote: "I would strongly urge that at this congress [the Twelfth Congress—M. H.] a number of changes be made in our political struc­ture."¹³⁷ For Lenin "an increase in the number of Central Committee mem­bers to a few dozen or even a hundred represented a significant change in the political structure. He placed such an increase "at the head of the list." The Central Committee elected at the Eleventh Congress had twenty- seven full members and nineteen alternates. If we add to that the Control

Commission, with five full members and two alternates, we get a total of fifty-three. That is, the central leadership already consisted of "several dozen." To increase it to a hundred would have meant doubling its size. The new members were to come, as Lenin advised, from among the rank- and-file workers in the party. However, he himself had written a little earlier, "Is it really true that every worker knows how to run the state? People working in the practical sphere know that this is a fairy tale."¹³⁸

Enlarging the Central Committee was intended to heighten its authority and improve the machinery of party and state in general. If we keep in mind the fact that Lenin was recommending the election of workers from the factory floor to the Central Committee, that is, people completely un­familiar with the administrative work of the party, the absurdity of the advice becomes clear, despite its author's conviction that this measure could work a miraculous cure.

The miracle cure was supposed to transform the "political structure" of the party. Lenin knew perfectly well that he was the real leader of the party. He tried to lead like the conductor of an orchestra and avoid brutal re­pressive measures against his comrades. If necessary, when controversies became too sharp, he used the weapon of his personal authority as the party's founder and leader, the man who had made the revolution against the advice of many of his lieutenants and whose far-sightedness had been confirmed by the Brest-Litovsk treaty. At the Ninth Party Congress in March—April 1920 a group of Old Bolsheviks called for a broadening of party democracy. These democratic centralists reproached Lenin for the fact that "a tiny handful of party oligarchs decide everything" and that the Central Committee had imposed a system of "bureaucratic centralism." Lenin replied with a theoretical explanation of the necessity for one-man dictatorship: "Soviet socialist democracy and individual management and dictatorship are in no way contradictory. ... The will of a class may some­times be carried out by a dictator, who sometimes does more alone and is frequently more necessary."¹³⁹

In 1920 Lenin had spoken in favor of a dictator, but in the last weeks of his conscious life in 1922—23 he was in despair because he saw several candidates for dictator. A conflict among them meant the danger of a split in the party. This was something Lenin feared greatly. He who had never hesitated to split if he was not obeyed unquestioningly now feared the deadly consequences of a split after his death.

In his Testament, Lenin gave his assessment of the six leading figures in the Central Committee. In Gogol's Dead Souls Sobakevich gave Chichikov the following brief description of the inhabitants of their provincial capital: "The only decent man in town is the prosecutor, and he too is a swine." This was the immortal model Lenin followed in characterizing his associates on the Central Committee.

First Lenin took up the "two outstanding leaders of the present Central Committee," Stalin and Trotsky. He regarded the possibility of a clash between these two potential dictators as "the greater part of the danger of a split." Lenin continued: "Comrade Stalin, having become general sec­retary, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution." On the other hand, Trotsky "is distinguished not only by out­standing ability. He is personally perhaps the most capable man in the present Central Committee. But he has displayed excessive self-assurance and shown excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of the work." Then came Zinoviev and Kamenev, Lenin's closest comrades in the prerevolutionary days of exile. He commented meaningfully that "the October episode with Zinoviev and Kamenev [that is, their opposition to the October revolution] was, of course, no accident, but neither can the blame for it be laid upon them personally, any more than nonbolshevism can upon Trotsky." The Testament then devoted a "few words" to Bukharin and Pyatakov, "the most outstanding figures among the younger party mem­bers." Of Bukharin, Lenin said, "[He] is not only a major and most valuable party theorist; he is also rightly considered the favorite of the whole party, but his theoretical views can be classified as fully Marxist only with great reserve." As for Pyatakov, "he is unquestionably a man of outstanding will and outstanding ability, but he shows too much zeal for administration and the administrative side of the work to be relied upon in a serious political matter."

Ten days later Lenin dictated an "Addition to the Letter," stating in part:

Stalin is too rude, and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealings among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a general sec­retary. That is why I suggest the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite, more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc.

The direction of Lenin's thinking is obvious. Not one of the "outstanding members of the Central Committee" was worthy of succeeding him; none of them had the necessary abilities to act as dictator, to exercise one-man rule over the party. Lenin disqualified the two most outstanding leaders,

Stalin and Trotsky, because one had concentrated unlimited authority in his hands and might not always be capable of using it with sufficient caution while the other displayed excessive self-assurance and was excessively preoccupied with the purely administrative side of things. (The recollection that Trotsky had had a Communist commissar, Panteleev, shot was also very much alive among the Old Bolsheviks.) Besides, the author of the Testament did not fail to mention Trotsky's non-Bolshevik past. To be sure, he urged that Trotsky not be blamed for that any more than Zinoviev and Kamenev for their opposition to the October revolution, but it is unclear what Lenin meant when he suggested they should not be blamed personally for those errors. What is clear is that Lenin never forgot anything about anyone. In regard to Bukharin, although Lenin called him a major theo­retician of the party, he also reproached him for theoretical views that were not fully Marxist, rather a serious defect for a major theoretician of a Marxist party. Pyatakov, too, had outstanding abilities but could not be relied on in serious political questions, another contradiction that Lenin did not explain.

Lenin's Testament was not read at the Twelfth Congress, although heads of delegations were allowed to see it. Later there arose a legend that Stalin had concealed the letter from the party by not allowing it to be read to the Congress. It is true that within a few years the Testament became an illegal document, possession of which was punished by prison or a labor camp. But there is no question that in 1923 the "outstanding members of the Central Committee" had no desire to see it published. For several years even Trotsky denied the existence of Lenin's Testament—until Max Eastman published it in the United States in October 1926. Boris Souvarine likewise published it in France.

The message of the Testament leaves no room for doubt. Lenin was urging insistently that he be replaced by a collective leadership. Only then would the deficiencies of each member of the leadership be compensated for by the merits of the others. It is true that none of them had very great merits, but the leader of the party had no one but himself to blame for that. He had raised and trained those who were to replace him and in the process had gotten rid of any who showed the least bit of independence.

In 1920 at the Ninth Congress one of the democratic centralists, Valerian Osinsky, spoke of the dictatorship that was threatening the party and named three potential candidates for supreme dictator: Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. During the revolution and civil war the Soviet government was identified with two names by its supporters and enemies alike, Lenin and Trotsky.

Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, leader of the October insurrection, first people's commissar of foreign affairs, who issued inflammatory man­ifestos ('To All, to All, to All") calling for world revolution, the first representative of the "new world" to engage in talks with the imperialists (at Brest-Litovsk), organizer of the Red Army, and brilliant orator, Leon Trotsky was considered by many the natural successor to Lenin. He too considered himself such. This conviction was one of the main reasons for his defeat as the battle for Lenin's mantle began.

General secretary of the Central Committee, member of the Politburo and the Orgburo, people's commissar of nationalities, and people's com­missar of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate, Joseph Stalin was known only to the narrow circles of the party and military leadership. He rarely spoke at meetings. His articles did not sparkle with professional crafts­manship. John Reed did not even mention him in Ten Days That Shook the World, Reed's chronicle of the October revolution. But at the beginning of 1918, when Lenin became fed up with the endless discussions in the Central Committee and sought to have a special bureau created "for solving urgent questions," it consisted of four men: Lenin, Trotsky, Sverdlov, and Stalin. Stalin was also a member of the editorial board of Pravda, along with Trotsky, Bukharin, and Sokolnikov.

Lenin had complete confidence in Stalin and indulged all his caprices, while Stalin, aware of his importance, behaved like a prima donna. When at the Eleventh Party Congress Preobrazhensky listed all of Stalin's duties and questioned whether it was possible for one man to handle this vast amount of work on the Politburo, the Orgburo, two commissariats, and a dozen subcommittees of the Central Committee, Lenin immediately spoke up in Stalin's defense, calling him irreplaceable as commissar of nation­alities and adding: 'The same thing applies to the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate. This is a vast business; but to be able to handle investigations we must have at the head of it a man who enjoys high prestige."¹⁴⁰ After the Eleventh Congress (March—April 1922), Lenin proposed Stalin for the post of general secretary, only to complain eight months later, as though he had forgotten what he had done, that Stalin had concentrated too much authority in his hands. Lenin also made the sudden discovery that there were major defects in the functioning of the Workers' and Peasants' In­spectorate and that Stalin was the main source of the monstrous growth of bureaucracy.

Stalin did not make himself general secretary. Lenin did. Lenin had been his mentor, protector, and constant model. According to Boris Sou- varine, Victor Adler once chided Plekhanov jokingly, "Lenin's your son." Plekhanov retorted, "If he's my son, he's an illegitimate one." Souvarine adds: "Lenin might have said the same about Stalin."¹⁴¹ The question of whether Lenin was the legitimate or illegitimate son of Plekhanov and Marx continues to stir debate among philosophers, historians, and specialists in family law, but the question of whether Stalin was Lenin's son is disputed less and less. Stalin was not only his legitimate heir but his only one. The fact that the father, at the end of his life, got angry at his son and tried to disinherit him is nothing unusual.

Many reasons are given to explain Stalin's rise to power. The main reason was that he was Lenin's legitimate heir. The majority of the party perceived the situation that way. This was a necessary condition for his success, but as the logicians say, it was not by itself sufficient reason.

Stalin displayed brilliant strategy in the struggle for power. First of all, he pretended not to want the power and formed an alliance with two other hopefuls, Zinoviev and Kamenev, letting them act as senior partners in a triumvirate. Trotsky, on the other hand, tended to alienate all who were not his loyal allies.

The Bolsheviks, who looked at themselves in the mirror of the French revolution, saw in Trotsky, the commissar of war and chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council, a potential Bonaparte. Trotsky knew this and yet in a pamphlet entitled Lessons of October, which he published after Lenin's death, he wrote: "Robespierre never had the chance to acquaint himself with the Plekhanovian philosophical idea. He violated all the laws of sociology and instead of exchanging handshakes with the Girondists he cut off their heads."¹⁴² Trotsky committed an irreparable error in threatening to use the guillotine when he was unable to make good his threat. By bringing up the question of Zinoviev's and Kamenev's conduct in October 1917, Trotsky seemes to have forced the triumvirs to drag up his own non- Bolshevik past.

On October 8, 1923, Trotsky sent a letter to the Central Committee. Lest he be accused of factionalism, he signed it alone. A week later the Central Committee received the so-called Platform of the Forty-Six, which discussed the same issues Trotsky had brought up. Among the signers were Preobrazhensky, Pyatakov, Antonov-Ovseenko, Vladimir Kosior, and Osinsky. Both letters sharply criticized "the policies of the majority of the Politburo."

The first part of the Platform of the Forty-Six spoke of a grave economic crisis: strikes, growing unemployment, production breakdowns, and the inefficiency of most of heavy industry. The blame for the catastrophic situation was laid on the majority faction in the Politburo. The second part of the platform spoke of a crisis within the party: "We observe the ever increasing, and scarcely concealed, division of the party between a sec­retarial hierarchy and 'the quiet folk,' between professional party officials recruited from above and the general mass of the party, which does not participate in party life."¹⁴³ The Platform of the Forty-Six made the same arguments as Trotsky's letter. Both asserted that the source of the party crisis lay in the system by which all secretaries of local party organizations were appointed from above rather than elected by the organization.

Trotsky and his associates were absolutely correct. The appointment system was Stalin's most effective instrument in conquering power. Although he did not invent it, he perfected it. Boris Souvarine, in his analysis of the structure of the state, singled out the two chief concentrations of central power—the Secretariat, which worked in close association with the Org- buro; and the Central Control Commission, with its local control commis­sions, introduced in 1920 to register all complaints against officialdom but very quickly transformed into a weapon for combatting all criticism and maintaining the strictest discipline.

The importance of the Secretariat was that it handled all questions re­lating to personnel assignments and leadership posts in local organizations. In 1920 a Department of Records and Assignments, the Uchraspred, was established within the Secretariat, with the initial task of organizing emer­gency mobilizations of party members. It set the mobilization quotas for each local organization. After the civil war, when major mobilizations of party members ended, the Uchraspred took over the job of assigning per­sonnel to party posts. Under the party's rules, members were always totally at the disposal of the Central Committee. After the civil war this meant at the disposal of the Uchraspred. By the beginning of 1923 all party posts down to the district level came under its jurisdiction. At the Twelfth Party Congress in 1923 the report on the work of the Uchraspred stated that during 1922 it had assigned "more than 10,000 party members, about half of whom were 'responsible officials.'"¹⁴⁴

The party congress elected the Central Committee, which in turn elected the Politburo, Orgburo, and Secretariat. The Secretariat, through the Uchraspred, chose all the regional and district secretaries of party com­mittees. They in turn selected the delegates to the congress, which elected the Secretariat. By 1923 this system, in which the Secretariat in effect elected itself, had been perfected. Stalin had the party machinery in his hands.

Trotsky and his associates justly criticized the system of appointments from above, but they were criticizing a system that Lenin had created and were thereby violating Lenin's precepts. More importantly, they were crit­icizing a system created with their consent and participation. They voiced their opposition to the system after the Twelfth Congress, when it began to turn against them. Despite the sharp polemics between the supporters of Trotsky and Stalin, they agreed on one decisive point: the party should run the entire life of the country, not only its political life, but social, economic, and cultural matters as well. Their agreement on this point showed that the struggle between Stalin and Trotsky was in the last analysis only a struggle for power.

Lenin had often stressed the all-encompassing role of the party. In 1918 the non-Communist specialist S. Liberman discovered intolerable practices among those in charge of the lumber industry. Lenin listened to Liberman's complaints, agreed with him, then warned: "The rectification of our errors must always come from above, not from specialists. That is why if you have any proposals, you should call me on the phone, and I myself will make the necessary changes."¹⁴⁵ At the end of his life Lenin was to say: "We must know and remember that the entire constitution of the Soviet Republic, both in legal terms and practical matters, is based on the fact that the party does everything, planning, building, and straightening out errors, according to one single principle."¹⁴⁶ That principle was the autocratic rule of the party.

In the early 1920s Gabriel Myasnikov and the Workers' Group, which he organized among industrial workers in Petrograd and the Urals, put forward some slogans that were quite unusual for Communists. After the Tenth Party Congress, Myasnikov sent a letter to the Central Committee with the following proposal: "Now that we have smashed the resistance of the exploiters and constituted ourselves the sole power in the land, we must proclaim freedom of speech and the press of a kind that no one in the world has had before—for everyone, from the monarchists to the anarchists." Myasnikov was expelled from the party and arrested. After escaping from the Soviet Union in 1928, he acknowledged that he had remained alive thanks only to his "heroic past"—the murder of Grand Duke Mikhail Romanov.

On January 16, 1924, five days before Lenin died, the Thirteenth Party Conference decided to make public the entire resolution on party unity passed on Lenin's urging by the Tenth Party Congress in 1921. The con­ference reminded all who criticized the "Politburo majority" that they were fighting against Leninist ideas. In May 1924 at the Thirteenth Party Con­gress, the first after Lenin's death, Trotsky made clear once again that his entire past and future opposition to Stalin was nothing more than a struggle for power: "I have never recognized freedom for groupings inside the party, nor do I now recognize it, because under the present historical conditions groupings are merely another name for factions." Then Trotsky uttered words that in effect constituted a death sentence for all who criticized Stalin from the point of view of "true Leninism":

In the last analysis, the party is always right, because the party is the sole historical instrument the working class possesses for the solution of its fundamental tasks. ... I know that no one can be right against the party. It is only possible to be right with the party and through it since history has not created any other way to determine the correct position.¹⁴⁷

If the party is always right, if one cannot oppose it, if there can be no doubt that it alone will carry out the mission assigned to it by history, the only alternative is to try to seize power within the party.

On January 21, 1924, Lenin died. Stalin organized the funeral in his own manner. Despite the protests of many Old Bolsheviks and of Lenin's widow, Lenin's corpse was embalmed and placed in a glass coffin inside a mausoleum built of wood upon Red Square. On January 30, Krupskaya asked in Pravda that Lenin not be mourned with "public worship of him." She asked that statues of him not be erected nor cities named after him. "If you wish to honor Vladimir Ilyich's name, build child care centers, kindergartens, houses, schools, and so on." The opposite was done. Gi­gantic funeral ceremonies were organized, as were pilgrimages to the mau­soleum. Petrograd was renamed Leningrad. Cities like Lenino, Leninsk, and Ulyanovsk appeared on the map.

The deification of Lenin was particularly necessary for his heirs, each of whom tried to tear off a piece of his halo. They felt themselves to be lesser deities. Along with Leningrad other new names for towns and cities appeared: Zinovievsk, Trotsk, and Stalingrad. And all the while Stalin was operating for the most part in the background, pushing Zinoviev to the fore. On January 26, Stalin spoke very modestly in the Hall of Columns at the Central Trade Union Building in Moscow. His modest speech, which Soviet schoolchildren would later be required to learn by heart for decades there­after, was entitled "A Pledge." Pravda published only short excerpts.

The spectacular funeral for Lenin showed convincingly that Stalin was Lenin's most outstanding disciple. The Politburo, after placing Lenin's body in the mausoleum, thus encasing the relics of the new saint, at the same time submitted their teacher's brain to scientific examination. A German professor by the name of Vogt undertook the task and soon discovered "important peculiarities in the structure of the so-called pyramidal cells of the third layer." The journalists of the time reported that these special characteristics of Lenin's brain were "the reason for his ingenious ideas and the ingenious tactics that Lenin devised at the most difficult stages of the revolution when many others felt the ground slip from under their feet and lost all perspective."¹⁴⁸ The deification of the leader proceeded, fully in accordance with the doctrine of Marx: the mausoleum represented the cultural-ideological superstructure; the pyramidal cells, the material base.

THE YEARS OF WAITING

Saltykov-Shchedrin, the Russian satirist, told the story of the people of Glupov (Dumbville), who under one of their governors had a holiday in the spring to commemorate the ills of the past and one in the fall to prepare for the evils to come. The people of the Soviet Union celebrated the years 1923—1926 as a time of hope and expectation. It was one of the calmest periods in Soviet history, despite continued rumblings of discontent. The country was slowly convalescing, gradually getting back on its feet, re­membering with horror the ills of the past, mourning its millions of dead, and hoping for better things to come.

One of the rare personal diaries that has come down to us from the 1920s has the following entry for December 17, 1923:

Policies have changed. Free trade is permitted now, and theaters, streetcars, newspapers, etc., cost money. But Lenin has preserved an oasis of socialism in Russia—the government agencies and their staffs—while he allows the rest of the country to live the capitalist way. So far as anyone can foresee, the second stage of our revolution will come down to a struggle between these two principles, the socialist and the capitalist.¹⁴⁹

Mostly it was the rural areas that began to "live the capitalist way." Nowhere was the return to normalcy painless, however. Industry was seized with a sudden passion for profit making and raised its prices drastically. A widening gap, or "scissors," to use Trotsky's term, appeared between prices for manufactured goods and those for agricultural products. In 1924 the "scissors" began to close again as the party took up a new slogan, "Face the Countryside." The "link" (smychka), the bond between the work­ers and the peasants, was declared to be fundamental to all government policy. Land area under cultivation quickly increased, reaching 80 percent of the prewar total. In 1925 Bukharin issued his famous call to the peas­antry: "Enrich yourselves. Develop your plots of land. Don't be afraid of restrictions."¹⁵⁰ On the eighth anniversary of the revolution Stalin declared, "At present our task is to forge a solid alliance with the middle peasantry."

Industry also revived, although the process was slower than in agricul­ture. The introduction of material incentives in industry and the formation of conglomerates that were given the capitalist name trusts and that operated on the basis of profitability helped to hasten the recovery of industry. This was especially true of small industry, which produced for the peasant market. It did not require large outlays of capital and provided a quick return on investment. The expansion of the domestic market made possible a fairly rapid revival of plants producing consumer goods. Heavy industry recovered at a slower pace.

Industrial recovery based on the profit principle had one adverse effect, unemployment. In October 1921 there were 150,000 unemployed; at the beginning of 1924, 240,000. This increase was in part the result of layoffs by factories seeking to increase profits by reducing payrolls but also the result of an influx from the countryside. Together with unemployment there was a severe shortage of skilled labor.

Demands for higher productivity, which was obtained "through the in­tensification of labor and only to a small degree through improved orga­nization of production and modernization of equipment,"¹⁵¹ caused much unrest among the workers, especially since increased productivity was not accompanied by wage increases. In the spring of 1925 a wave of strikes swept the main industrial areas, particularly Moscow and Ivanovo. Sokol- nikov, the commissar of finance, admitted in 1925 that "in the eighth year of Soviet power" the wages of metalworkers, miners, and rail workers had barely reached the prewar level. The average wage in 1925 was 40 cher- vonets. M. Larsons wrote that in 1923 a people's commissar received 210 chervonets as well as an apartment.¹⁵²

A new class of capitalists, the Nepmen, came into existence with the introduction of the NEP, a social group that seemed to exist beyond the pale of Soviet society. They did not have the right to vote, they could not form professional associations or be members of trade unions, and their children could not study at the university level. They owed their existence to a policy reversal by the Soviet government, and they understood that at any time a change of policy could sign their death warrant. The Nepmen were necessary for NEP, but they were treated with repugnance. Private businessmen never lost the feeling of precariousness, that their existence was only temporary. That was why private enterprise attracted mainly ad­venturers and speculators, whose hope it was to make some fast money and spend it as quickly as possible while keeping out of sight of the ever watchful GPU. Due to the hostility of the Soviet system toward private enterprise and the reluctance of private businessmen to invest in any long- term industrial projects, throughout the NEP period the share of private business in overall industrial production remained quite small: 3.8 percent in 1925.¹⁵³

The fact that the social organism contained an alien presence in the form of capitalists contributed to the special atmosphere of this era in Soviet history. The Nepmen were accused, for example, of corrupting the Com­munists and were blamed for the massive spread of alcoholism.

The question of whether to legalize the production of alcohol in the land of the radiant future provided lengthy debate among the Bolsheviks. Before the revolution they had fiercely criticized the tsarist government for profiting from drunkenness. Now they had to choose whether to continue or revoke prohibition, which had been introduced by Nicholas II at the beginning of World War I.

Those who favored legalizing alcohol production, with a state monopoly on vodka, argued that illegal production was very widespread and that large revenues for the state could be obtained by legalization. In 1922 Pravda published a ringing declaration by an Old Bolshevik, A. Yakovlev, with the headline, "It Shall Not Pass." Yakovlev sharply denounced a certain Professor Ozerov, who favored government sale of vodka, promising that it would bring 250 million gold rubles per year into the state coffers. Ozerov proposed charging twice the price before the revolution. Yakovlev replied:

Soviet power, which exists for the people and for the national economy,... cannot take this suicidal road for the sole reason that in the pursuit of these imaginary 250 million, or even a real sum of that size, the national economy would suffer such losses and such destruction that even billions of rubles would not make up for it.¹⁵⁴

The ranks of the party and the Central Committee were against a revival of the state monopoly on the sale of alcohol. Nevertheless, the Politburo insisted on the measure. The debate continued until 1924. Stalin ended the discussion when he introduced a statement at a Central Committee plenum, signed by six other Central Committee members, solemnly stating that Lenin had told him and the other six in the summer and fall of 1922 that the vodka monopoly had to be introduced. In so doing Stalin annulled "all of Lenin's earlier statements on this question" found in his collected works. In 1927 Stalin recalled their discussions:

What's better, the bondage of foreign capital or the introduction of liquor? That was the issue before us. Clearly, we settled on vodka because we felt— and still feel—that if we, for the sake of the victory of the workers and peasants, have to soil ourselves a little bit, then we will agree to even those extreme means in the interest of our cause.¹⁵⁵

The vodka monopoly introduced in January 1923 was a compromise. The production of vodka was legalized at only half its normal strength—that is, 40 proof. This was immediately called Rykov vodka, or rykovka, in honor of the party leader who signed the decree and who himself was no enemy of the bottle. The power and attraction of alcohol was explained this way by Aron Solts, the Old Bolshevik known as the "conscience of the party":

When life is hard, when you don't have the strength or hope to change it, you wish you could picture it or imagine it to be different. To do this you have to put reason to sleep and dull the power of critical thought, which you can do with alcohol. When you drink you forget all your sorrows, all your troubles disappear, and all your problems fade away.¹⁵⁶

This comment, which ends up sounding rather favorable toward alcohol, may provide a clue to some of the thinking behind the steady increase in vodka production, aside from the desire for larger state revenues. The initial plan for vodka production for the year 1929—30 provided for 41 million vedra (406 million liters), but this was increased to 46 million (456 million liters).¹⁵⁷ In those days sorrows, troubles, and problems were mul­tiplying by the thousands.

Public Prosecutor Ivan Kondurushkin gave this summary of NEP's re­sults:

As of 1927 we have accomplished the following: (1) restored industry to the prewar level of production; (2) restored the transportation system, which is now working smoothly; (3) stabilized the currency; (4) revived and organized the working class, which numbers 300,000 more than in 1922; and (5) revived agriculture, fully restoring the area previously under cultivation.¹⁵⁸

The economic success of the policy begun in March 1921 was undeniable. It enabled the economy to return more or less to its prewar condition. But that was not the goal of the Bolshevik party, which had made a revolution in order to create a new society and a new kind of human being.

During the "years of waiting" between the end of the civil war and the beginning of the Stalin revolution the old society was under attack on every front. The first Soviet legal code on the family and marriage was adopted on September 18, 1918. Its aim was to "revolutionize" the family and the four main provisions of this code did indeed make it a revolutionary doc­ument for its time: only civil (not religious) marriage was recognized; there was no requirement for consent by any third party to a marriage; divorce was permitted without restrictions—if only one member of the couple wanted it, the divorce went through a court, but in cases of mutual consent, divorces were granted by the marital registry office; and the legal concept of ille­gitimacy pertaining to children was abolished.

The chief expression of this revolution in the family was the destruction of the "old bourgeois morality." The ideas of Alexandra Kollontai, com­missar of social welfare and a prominent party member, were very widely accepted. Clara Zetkin in her Recollections of Lenin described his attitude toward Kollontai's ideas: "No doubt you have heard the famous theory that in communist society satisfying sexual desire and the craving for love will be as simple and trivial as 'drinking a glass of water.⁹ A section of our youth has gone mad, absolutely mad, over this 'glass of water.'"¹⁵⁹

It was true that the "glass of water" theory became very popular in a society where the family had suffered heavy losses continuously for seven years of war and revolution. According to the 1897 census, women con­stituted 50.3 percent of the population, and men 49.7 percent, roughly equal proportions. According to the census of 1926, there were 5 million fewer men than women in the Soviet Republic. It was under these conditions that the party waged its fight against the "bourgeois family." Lenin expressed his indignation over "free love" theories in private to Zetkin and others, but he never spoke about it publicly. Instead he preached the "new rev­olutionary morality." The hero of a novel about free love that was popular in the 1920s quoted Lenin almost word for word: "Komsomol morality does exist. ... Our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the pro­letarian class struggle! Komsomol morality is a system that serves the working people in its struggle against exploitation of every kind. Whatever is useful to the revolution is moral; whatever is harmful to it is immoral and intolerable."¹⁶⁰ Morality as a weapon in the class struggle was a theme constantly reiterated by party theoreticians. Preobrazhensky dedicated his book, The Moral and Class Norms of Bolshevism, to that paragon of Bol­shevik morality, GPU leader Felix Dzerzhinsky.

The party's policy toward children also contributed to the breakup of the family. In the ABCs of Communism, Bukharin and Preobrazhensky, the authors of this most popular 1920s guidebook for the "new Soviet man," wrote: "Children belong to the society into which they are born, not to their parents."¹⁶¹ A prominent Soviet legal authority, one of the drafters of the new code on marriage and the family, expressed the same idea even more succinctly: "The family must be replaced by the Communist party."¹⁶²

On September 30, 1918, at virtually the same time that the new family code was adopted, the All-Russia Central Executive Committee approved a resolution establishing schools that would combine learning with labor. The school was revolutionized. Everything outdated was thrown away: desks, daily lessons, homework, textbooks, grades, tests. All education was made free of charge and coeducational. In working out a model for the new Soviet school, the Bolsheviks drew upon the most advanced pedagogical ideas of Russian educators, in particular, Konstantin Ventsel, as well as those of progressive Western educators, such as John Dewey.

The new Soviet school was "self-administered" by a collective consisting of all pupils and all employees, from the teachers to the janitors. The very word teacher was abolished and replaced by the term shkrab, short for shkolny rabotnik, school employee.

During the civil war the Soviet government was unable to carry out its Utopian dreams for this new type of school. Only at the end of 1923 was a plan adopted for reorganizing the school system, which was to be oriented toward the training of skilled specialists who would have a Marxist, working- class view of the world. One thing had been accomplished during the initial, Utopian phase: teachers' resistance to the politicization of the school had been broken. Lenin insisted that the bourgeoisie be fought in the schools as well, that education cannot proceed apart from politics. The chief slogan in the second phase of the Soviet school system was, "We do not need literacy without communism." As a result, communism was included every­where, even in arithmetic. For example, students were asked to solve the following problem: 'The insurrection in which the Parisian proletariat took power occurred on March 18 in 1871. The Paris commune fell on May 22 the same year. How long did it last?" The politicization of education was facilitated by the use of new methods comprehensively conceived with long- term aims. Or, as the Small Soviet Encyclopedia said, "in the Soviet Union for the first time in history, schools took up the task of combatting religion; the school became an antireligious institution."¹⁶³

Education was unabashedly made a class privilege. When children started school, they were immediately and bluntly made aware of their class origins. Among the first lessons they learned was that people were divided into two categories, the higher category of working people and the lower category of nonworkers.

One of the main aims of the class-oriented school was to train interna­tionalists, as V. N. Shulgin, an influential Marxist educator explained: "Our goal is not to turn out a Russian child, a child of the Russian state, but a citizen of the world, an internationalist, a child who will fully understand the interests of the working class and who is capable of fighting for the world revolution. ... We educate our children, not for the defense of the motherland but for worldwide ideals."¹⁶⁴

This education of children in the spirit of universal ideals meant first of all the extirpation of their national roots. "We realized a little too late," Mikhail Pokrovsky admitted in a self-criticism at the First Conference of Marxist Historians, "that the term Russian history is a counterrevolutionary term." Schools taught the history of the revolutionary movement. Civic history was eliminated. The manipulation of social memory began. Simul­taneously war was declared on classical Russian literature. In 1930 a proletarian literary critic objected that "the terms 'Russian literature' and 'the history of Russian literature' have not yet been denied their civil rights as part of the school curriculum, of textbooks, and of teaching aids."¹⁶⁵ Many classical writers were removed from the curriculum and others were studied only from a special angle. For example, the works of Pushkin, Griboedov, and Lermontov were analyzed as models of "the literary style of the Russian nobility during the rise of commercial-industrial capitalism."

One of the most tragic consequences of war and revolution were the homeless children, the besprizorniki. Hundreds of thousands of children lost their parents in the war zones, and millions lost them during the 1921 famine. Government statistics spoke of 7 million homeless children in 1922.¹⁶⁶ The officially encouraged breakup of the family only increased the problem. Krupskaya admitted in 1925: "I myself have written in the past that the problem of homeless children was a legacy of the war and economic dislocation, but after observing these children, I can see that we must stop speaking in those terms. We must say that the roots of the problem lie not only in the past but also in the present."¹⁶⁷

In 1921, at the height of the famine, a civic organization, the Save the Children League, was suppressed. It had functioned since 1918 and in­cluded former members of the Cadet party, SRs, and Mensheviks, as well as unaffiliated activists. The Commissariat of Education had insisted that the League be abolished on the grounds that representatives of the bourgeoi­sie could not be allowed to rescue proletarian children and then miseducate them. A Commission to Improve the Lives of Children was organized and placed under the direction of Dzerzhinsky, head of the Cheka. Thus, con­cern for children became the task of the organs of repression.

Two months after the revolution a new law was passed under which all cases involving children or adolescents under eighteen were transferred from the common courts to "special commissions for cases involving minors, these commissions having purely pedagogical and medical aims." It was forbidden to refer to minors as criminals; they were delinquents. In 1920 a new decree allowed the special commissions to refer cases involving minors above fourteen back to the regular courts.

A policy of harsh punishment became one way of dealing with the problem of homeless children. They were imprisoned or sent to concentration camps. Another solution was to place them in what were called children's homes or in a special category of such institutions—vocational-agricultural labor colonies. Among Communist educators one theory gained a special cur­rency: namely, that these children without parents or families could serve as splendid material for breeding the "new Soviet man." Many of the children's homes and labor colonies were placed under GPU jurisdiction. Finally, there was a third way of dealing with the problem—leaving the homeless children to their fate. Delinquents for whom vacancies could be found were sent for reeducation to the children's homes; the rest were left on the streets.

Toward the end of the 1920s, the economic revival and improved material conditions brought about a reduction in the number of homeless children. The Stalin revolution in the 1930s would throw new millions of children without parents into the streets.

One of the chief tasks undertaken by the Soviet government was the elimination of illiteracy. In 1855, 93 percent of all Russians were illiterate; in 1897 the figure was approximately 77 percent. The American scholar Daniel Lerner, basing himself on information drawn from twenty-two coun­tries, has demonstrated a very close link between urbanization and literacy. In the mid-nineteenth century only two Russian cities had more than 100,000 inhabitants. In the early twentieth century, when Russia's industrial growth rate became one of the fastest in Europe, the literacy rate rose rapidly. The tsarist government, however, is not usually given credit for this rise in the literacy rate.

Immediately after the October revolution the "anti-illiteracy front" was opened, alongside the military front and the economic front. The goal was not so much to teach illiterates how to read and write as to teach them to think correctly. 'The illiterate," Lenin explained, "remains outside of pol­itics, and that is why he must be taught the alphabet. Without this there can be no politics."¹⁶⁸ Bogdanov, the ideologist of proletarian culture, held the view that illiteracy would be eliminated and education provided to the people spontaneously through a kind of natural process. Lenin's view was the exact opposite. A decree of the Council of People's Commissars on the elimination of illiteracy, which Lenin signed on December 26, 1919, said in the preamble:

With the aim of providing the entire population of the republic the opportunity of conscious participation in the political life of the country the Council of People's Commissars hereby decrees: All inhabitants of the republic between the ages of eight and fifty who do not know how to read or write must take part in the literacy campaign.

The workday for illiterates was reduced by two hours with no cut in pay. However, article 8 specified that "those who seek to avoid the obligations put into effect by this decree ... will be subject to prosecution."¹⁶⁹ Learning to read and write became a duty, a kind of tax required by the government, and refusal to fulfill this obligation was made a crime.

In 1926, when the first census was taken under Soviet rule, it was determined that 5 million people had overcome illiteracy. This indicates that after the revolution the population acquired literacy at approximately the same rate as before, despite all the noisy propaganda and intimidating decrees. In the early 1930s the literacy rate would rise much more quickly, with intensified industrialization and urbanization.

A new family and marriage code adopted in 1928 completed the stage of revolutionary upheavals in the realm of family law. Under the new code registered and unregistered marriages were recognized as equally valid. Either husband or wife could dissolve the marriage without even informing the other. All he or she had to do was make a written statement. A postcard to the registry office was sufficient. "A divorce now costs three rubles," wrote Mikhail Koltsov in Pravda. "No more formalities, no papers, no summons, not even the need to inform in advance the person you are divorcing. Subscribing to a magazine is harder. ... For three rubles why not indulge yourself?"¹⁷⁰

The new legal code was meant to strike a mortal blow at the family and to tear apart the social ties which had begun to reassert themselves under NEP. The struggle against the intelligentsia and the destruction of the family and the old morality were meant to clear the ground for the new society. Since the state felt itself to be insufficiently powerful as yet, it sought to disrupt all ties between individuals, leaving each isolated in relation to the state.

Despite all this, the countryside—where the majority of the people lived—remained a bulwark of the old forms of authority and old morality. It was through the cells of the Young Communist League (the Komsomol), and especially in the form of "free love," that the new morality reached the countryside, although its influence remained marginal during this pe­riod.

Religion did not wither away despite the bitter fight against it. Churches were torn down, members of the clergy arrested, and antireligious propa­ganda constantly intensified. The publishing house Atheist began opera­tions in 1922. A newspaper by the same name began to come out once every five days in 1923, along with a monthly magazine Bezbozhnik и stanka (The godless at the workplace), which published caricatures prefiguring the crude anti-Semitic cartoons of the Nazi era. On February 17, 1923, Emelyan Yaroslavsky, director of antireligious propaganda, announced the formation of the League of Militant Atheists, which published the mass distribution magazine Bezbozhnik (The godless).

The struggle against the Orthodox church was made easier by the schism that persisted within it and by certain improprieties disclosed at the higher levels of the patriarchate. In December 1926, Metropolitan Sergii, exe­cuting the duties of the patriarch, was arrested. He was released in March 1927 and in July published a declaration which, to quote a historian, "transformed the church into an active ally of the Soviet government."¹⁷¹ The majority of the clergy and the faithful, this historian continues, under­stood that "this sin was necessary to save the church from destruction." A number of bishops were sent to penal exile on the Solovetsky Islands, and although they did not endorse Metropolitan Sergii's declaration per se, they urged that the unity of the church be maintained. In spite of this "spiritual and moral catastrophe for the Russian church,"¹⁷² religion continued to serve as a barrier to the degradation of society and the creation of the "new human being" the Soviet authorities wanted. Religion remained a traditional model, whose existence alongside the model of the new Soviet man allowed comparisons and a choice. But the party did not lay down its arms. "Have we suppressed the reactionary clergy?" asked Comrade Stalin in 1927. He answered: "Yes, we have suppressed them. The only trouble is that we have not yet eliminated them completely. Antireligious propaganda is the means that must bring to completion the job of eliminating the reactionary clergy."¹⁷³ Stalin was explaining the situation to a delegation of American workers, but he failed to add that besides propaganda the job of elimination was being speeded along with the help of the GPU.

THE EMIGRES

During the "years of waiting" there was the other possibility for comparison. The window to the West remained open. Beginning at the end of 1922 trips abroad for a limited period of time became quite common. Soviet engineers, foreign trade officials, and Nepmen went abroad on business, and writers and artists went for professional reasons. It also became a common form of punishment to send party leaders who were out of favor on foreign assignments, commercial or diplomatic. For Russians the West had always been both attractive and repulsive. In the 1920s it seemed much more like home because of the large Russian emigr6 community.

The Soviet authorities even tried to influence the emigr6s, encouraging the changing landmarks tendency among them. This policy was symbolized by the founding of the newspaper Nakanune (On the eve), with editorial offices in both Moscow and Berlin. Soviet writers were allowed to publish their books in Berlin, Prague, and Riga as well as Moscow. It was not expressly forbidden to meet with emigr6s, and Soviet citizens who did so were not punished after returning home. Film rental agencies in the Soviet Union, seeking profits, went so far as to print pinup shots of Asta Nielsen and Mary Pickford in Pravda. Scenes of bourgeois decadence in the West, especially of sleazy Russian emigr6 taverns, were regularly featured in Soviet films. Theater audiences viewed with delight the scenes of corruption and splendor from the outside world.

Soviet party leaders engaged in lively polemics with emigi-ё politicians, and Soviet literary critics reviewed the books of emig^ writers. The tone was nasty, sarcastic, malicious; the victors were mocking the vanquished. Still, in a certain sense the emigr6 community remained a part of Soviet life. It was insulted and ridiculed but also feared to some extent. In turn the emigr6 community eagerly followed all developments inside Russia. The emigr6s were influenced by Soviet ideas, but they too influenced Soviet ideology.

The emigr6 community was a faithful reflection of prerevolutionary Rus­sian life, with its countless political parties and groupings and schools of religion, philosophy, and literature. Revolution and civil war, defeat and forced exile strengthened dogmatic and intolerant attitudes. One of the principal lessons of the civil war was never absorbed—that the defeat of the anti-Bolshevik camp was largely the result of lack of unity. In exile the politicians continued the struggle, but mostly among themselves, one party against another.

The church set the example. In the fall of 1921 a council of the church in exile convened in Karlovci, Yugoslavia. The monarchists sought to have the council proclaim a legitimate tsar from the house of Romanov. Others at the council protested that this would be "interfering in politics, which was inadmissable at a church gathering."¹⁷⁴ In 1922 Patriarch Tikhon condemned the Karlovci council for its political activities and named Met­ropolitan Eulogius the head of the church abroad. The majority of emig^s felt that the church in exile should be linked with the Patriarchate in Moscow. In 1926 and 1927 a split took place. Most of the bishoprics (eparchies) in Western Europe recognized the authority of Metropolitan Eulogius, but the bishoprics in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Far East accepted the authority of Metropolitan Antonius, a supporter of the Karlovci council. The monarchist movement was torn by inner dissension, especially between absolutist and constitutionalist tendencies and two rival pretenders: Nikolai Nikolaevich, the uncle of Tsar Nicholas II; and Kirill Vladimirovich, a grandson of Tsar Alexander II and a cousin of the last tsar.

In August 1922 Kirill Vladimirovich proclaimed himself the true heir to the throne, but the majority of the monarchists chose Nikolai Nikolaevich as their leader, although it was left open who would actually ascend the throne. That was to be decided after the monarchy's return to power in

Russia. The monarchist program essentially called for the formation of a new Volunteer Army to invade Russia. The key to success was financial aid, and possibly military aid, from abroad.

Pavel Milyukov, chief organizer and ideologist of what was called the Republican-Democratic Alliance, categorically rejected foreign aid. "I do not know how we will return to Russia," he said in 1925, "but I do know how we will not return." That is, it would be impossible to return in the wake of a foreign army.¹⁷⁵ During the NEP Milyukov came to the conclusion that a certain evolution was underway in Russia as a result of the long- term policies of the Soviet government, which was being forced to shift from destruction to reconstruction of Russia's productive forces. Milyukov proposed no plan of action but placed his hopes on a historical process that would lead the Russian people themselves to overthrow the regime that oppressed them.

Petr Struve, the spokesman for conservative liberalism, was attacked by both left and right. For the left he was a monarchist who wanted to reha­bilitate the tsarist regime. For the right he was a liberal who, horror of horrors, had been a Marxist in the past. He called for a strong state that would restore order in Russia and defend property rights while respecting the legitimate freedoms of the people.

The numerous parties of the left, People's Socialists, Left and Right Socialist Revolutionaries, Social Democrats, Mensheviks, and anarchists, debated the pros and cons of dictatorship by a party or by a class and argued over whether the Bolsheviks were socialists or not. In 1921 the Mensheviks began to publish Sotsialistichesky vestnik (Socialist herald) in Berlin. It provided a wealth of information about events in the Soviet Union.

Alongside the traditional parties new movements and organizations arose in exile. For example, an anthology was published in Sofia in 1921 entitled Exodus to the East, with the subtitle "Forebodings and Accomplishments: A Profession of Faith by the Eurasians." It set forth the main tenets of "Eurasianism." "We honor the past and present of Western European cul­ture, but we do not see it as the future," said the foreword to the anthology.¹⁷⁶ The authors felt, as Herzen had, that "history is now knocking at our door." In the article "A Turn Toward the East," Professor Savitsky asked rhetor­ically, "Are there many people in Russia in whose veins the blood of Khazars, Polovtsians, Tatars, or Bashkirs does not flow?"¹⁷⁷ Russia was not only the West but the East, not only Europe but Asia as well. In fact it was not Europe at all but Eurasia.¹⁷⁸ The anthology advocated Russian nationalism as its main secular idea. Its authors warned, however, that they did not want to restrict nationalism to the framework of national chauvin­ism.¹⁷⁹ The Eurasians went further than the Slavophiles, who had spoken not only of the Russian people but of all the Slavic peoples; the Eurasians appealed to "the entire range of peoples of the Eurasian world, among whom the Russian people occupy a special position."¹⁸⁰

A split occurred in the ranks of the Eurasians in 1929, marking the beginning of the end for this movement. Its ideas nevertheless inspired a broad range of political currents among Russian emigr6s. The idea that because of its geopolitical situation and national character Russia could never become a democracy drew a section of emigr6s with Eurasian views into collaboration with the Soviet government in the 1930s.

In 1923 a General Congress of Nationally Minded Russian Youth was held in Munich. It founded the League of Young Russians, electing A. L. Kazem-Bek as its president. This later became the Young Russia party, which advocated restoration of the monarchy in Russia with a legitimate heir from the house of the Romanovs to be placed on the throne. The congress passed a declaration that stated in part, 'The development of antinationalist, liberal, and democratic schools of thought undermined the state and cleared the way for aggressive socialism and its logical culmi­nation, modern communism." The declaration singled out as the "most negative factors in modern life" what it called "freemasonry and interna­tional capital, which is concentrated mostly in the hands of the Jews."¹⁸¹

The Young Russia movement sought to combine monarchism with "young nationalist ideas," which were said to be on the rise in all countries. This meant, above all the ideas of Italian fascism. Their infatuation with nazism was to come later. (The Young Russians wore blue shirts and greeted their leader Kazem-Bek with shouts that were the equivalent of "Heil Hitler.") Varshavsky, the historian of this second generation of emigr6 youth, the "unnoticed generation," observed that the social orientation of the Young Russians and other Russian nationalist youth groups—expressed in the slogan "a monarchy above classes, a monarchy of the working people"— was related not only to the influence of fascism and national socialism but also to their personal experience. The harsh conditions of emigre life deep­ened their suspicion and hostility toward democracy. Fascism seemed to provide a program combining the ideas of national and social rebirth.

One of the paradoxes of emigre life was that the right-wing parties and movements which had been conservative in Russia engaged in revolutionary activity abroad, while parties with revolutionary pasts became passive. The activism of the right-wing parties, their training of cadres for a future army and infiltration of agitators and terrorists into the Soviet Union, made them easy prey for the GPU. Soviet agents and provocateurs penetrated all the emigr6 organizations, but those favoring close ties with their homeland were especially vulnerable to GPU tricks and subterfuge.

All the parties and movements whose programs called for the restoration of a strong Russian state, nationalism, and opposition to democracy evolved in the same direction. The changing landmarks group, the Eurasians, and the Young Russians found more and more attractive features in the Soviet system and concluded that "there was no need to exaggerate the differences between the 'ideological' measures of the Communists and the real needs of the people."¹⁸² Ultimately they agreed to collaborate with the Communist authorities. The "cunning dialectic of revolution"¹⁸³ allowed them to close their eyes to all unpleasant features.

Only a small number of Russian emigres belonged to political parties, but the vast majority belonged to military, social, professional, and literary associations of one kind or another. Until the mid-1920s Germany was the center of Russian emigre life, especially Berlin, where there were at least forty Russian publishing houses, each of which brought out more than a thousand titles, and where three daily Russian papers were published, as well as numerous magazines, with views ranging from monarchist to an­archist. There too a Russian-language theater was able to survive. In the mid-1920s Paris became the center of Russian emigration, with as many as 300 emigre organizations. In Paris alone there were seven Russian newspapers and many magazines.

The tragedy of separation from the homeland, the difficulties and mis­fortunes of life in exile, the petty problems of everyday life, the perennial dissatisfaction with everything Western prevented the Russian emigres from seeing the enormous amount that they actually accomplished, their tre­mendous contribution to Russian culture. The creative work of major Rus­sian writers in exile such as Ivan Bunin and Marina Tsvetaeva, and of historians, philosophers, theologians, naturalists, engineers, artists, and painters are an inseparable part of the Russian heritage. But to this day no history of the Russian emigres has been written. Very few understood that there was another side to the tragedy of emigre life. This was best expressed by Vladimir Nabokov, who became a great writer in exile. On the tenth anniversary of the October revolution he wrote:

Above all we must celebrate ten years of freedom. The freedom that we enjoy, I believe, is not known in any country in the world. In the unique and special Russia that invisibly surrounds us, enlivens and supports us, feeds our souls, and colors our dreams, there is no law but the law of love of Russia and no power other than our own consciences. ... Some day we will thank the blind Clio for allowing us to taste this freedom and enabling us to understand and cultivate in exile our profound feeling for our native land. ... Let us not curse our exile. Let us repeat in our day the words of

Plutarch's ancient warrior: "Late at night in a savage land far from Rome I pitched my tent and my tent became Rome for me."¹⁸⁴

Nabokov composed this paean to inner freedom just at the time when the years of waiting were coming to an end in the Soviet Union.

WHO WILL PREVAIL?

The Thirteenth Party Congress marked the victory of a triumvirate, three leaders who had agreed to assume Lenin's mantle collectively. Kamenev chaired the congress, Zinoviev gave the report for the Central Committee, and Stalin organized the congress. Trotsky admitted defeat. But no sooner had the congress ended than Stalin began to undermine the position of his fellow triumvirs. Thus began the inexorable rise to power of Joseph Stalin.

A debate has gone on among historians for the past half century: Did Stalin create the apparatus or did the apparatus create Stalin? The desire to portray Stalin as the creator of the apparatus, the bureaucratic machine and system, is understandable. This conception allows one to divide Soviet history into the pre-Stalin, Stalin, and post-Stalin periods. But there is no doubt that the apparatus existed before Stalin, just as there is no doubt that he perfected it and used it to consolidate his power—just as his rivals tried unsuccessfully to do. 'To be a leader and organizer," Stalin wrote in 1924, "means first of all to know your party cadres, to be able to grasp their strengths and weaknesses... and second to know how to assign them."¹⁸⁵ Stalin's technique was quite simple, but effective. He especially knew the weaknesses of the party members he assigned to one or another post, and in making assignments his aim was above all to punish some and reward others. One of the delegates to the Fourteenth Party Congress in December 1925 made this revealing observation: 'The comrades are living and eating well right now, and so not everyone will raise his hand to vote against something, only to be sent to Murmansk or Turkestan for that."¹⁸⁶

The party apparatus, Stalin's instrument for taking power, was an out­growth of the party, but the character of the party had been shaped by Lenin more than anyone else. In 1926 Stalin's opponents—Trotsky, Zi­noviev, Kamenev, Krupskaya, Pyatakov, and others—formed the United Opposition. In July they addressed a letter to the joint plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission. They denounced the sit­uation in which "all discussion is from the top down and the ranks below merely listen, thinking for themselves only in isolated cases and on the sly. Those who are dissatisfied, have doubts, or disagree are afraid to raise their voices at party meetings. ... Party members are afraid."¹⁸⁷

The United Opposition sought to portray all this as the result of Stalin's policies. However, during the discussion held on the pages of Pravda in 1923, when the Oppositionists were still in power, the situation was the same. "Party members have forgotten how to think for themselves. They are afraid to 'y^aP' about anything until orders come from above. They wait for ready-made decisions to be handed down and even for the ready-made explanations for those decisions."¹⁸⁸ 'There is self-seeking, sycophancy, and fear of expressing one's own opinion. ... Everyone is pretty much preoccupied with the question of assignments and transfers."¹⁸⁹ "Under the system of command from above there is no party life for the ranks. The bureaucratic atmosphere, with official circulars setting the tone, pushes the ranks out of the picture. ... Tale bearing, informing, and bootlicking are increasing, and careerism thrives on this soil."¹⁹⁰ "Some party officials use 'comrade' only in addressing someone of lower rank. They invariably address their superiors (ingratiatingly) by their first and middle names."¹⁹¹ All of this was printed in the pages of Pravda during a brief moment of freedom for party members when a discussion was allowed by the top brass. They were talking about Lenin's party.

At the Fourteenth Congress in 1925 a member of the oppositional Len­ingrad delegation complained about the widespread practice of informing, which had taken "such forms and such characteristics that a comrade cannot tell his friend his most intimate thoughts."¹⁹² The complaining comrade was justly reprimanded by Sergei Gusev: "You're faking, Bakaich, you're faking, believe me. In the past Lenin taught us that every member of the party has to be an agent of the Cheka; in other words, keep his eyes open and act as an informer. ... I think that every party member must report on others. If we have a problem, it is not informing but the lack of informing."¹⁹³ Ten years later both of these men were able to return to the question of informing because both the complainer and the reprimander were in Lu- byanka prison. But Gusev was absolutely right to accuse Ivan Bakaev (familiarly called Bakaich) of faking. It was hardly appropriate for Bakaev, one-time head of the Petrograd Cheka, to complain about informing. And Gusev was a hundred times right to recall that informing became a party norm under Lenin.

Stalin did not invent the party; he inherited it from Lenin. But he perfected it and embellished upon it in his own way, discarding everything extraneous or incidental. He enlarged the Central Committee to sixty-three full members and forty-two alternate members in 1925, thereby carrying out Lenin's recommendation that a struggle between Stalin and Trotsky could be prevented in this way. He carried out what was called the Lenin enrollment, bringing 203,000 new members into the party from February to August 1924, increasing the membership by 50 percent. Earlier, at the end of 1923, the question of holding a "party week" for the recruitment of 100,000 new members was discussed. The prevailing opinion at that time was that "our cadres are not equipped to integrate such a large number of new recruits. Our Martin ovens, the party cells, don't have the capacity to refine and temper this quantity of youthful raw material."¹⁹⁴ Yet within a few months 200,000 members were admitted. The party underwent a drastic change. Its new members were ignorant of the extraneous or incidental traditions which Stalin was energetically uprooting. The aim of the Lenin enrollment was to bring workers from the factory floor into the party. But the flood of new recruits mainly consisted of privilege seekers. "Many of them," a party member complained in Pravda, December 8, 1924, "view the party as some sort of pancake covered with sour cream." The new recruits were looking for jobs and got them. Workers from the factory floor became workers with briefcases, and party members from the countryside were promoted just as readily. But they had to pay for these privileges. The members of the party became vassals. They forfeited even those min­imal liberties which Soviet citizens still enjoyed at the time.

The party, despite this rejuvenation, was led by the so-called Old Guard, the veteran party members. In January 1924 the Old Guard of those who had joined before 1917, those with experience in the tsarist underground, numbered only 8,249. The total party membership was 401,481, 56.6 percent of whom had joined between 1920 and 1924.¹⁹⁵

The struggle for power was waged among the numerically insignificant number of former underground activists. It was in those circles that the political combinations, coalitions, and blocs were formed. It was there that Stalin showed his remarkable abilities at political maneuvering, employing others to do his dirty work. The main burden of the assault on Trotsky in 1923—1924 was eagerly assumed by Zinoviev and Kamenev. Later, in fight­ing those two, Stalin used Bukharin and enjoyed the benevolent neutrality of Trotsky. Unlike Trotsky, who referred darkly to the guillotine, or Zinoviev, who demanded Trotsky's arrest for publishing his article "Lessons of Oc­tober," Stalin wore the mask of moderation. Recalling that his fellow trium­virs had demanded the arrest and expulsion of Trotsky, he uttered these remarkable words:

We did not agree with Zinoviev and Kamenev because we knew that a policy of amputation is fraught with grave dangers for the party, that the method of amputation and of bloodletting—for they demanded blood—is dangerous and contagious. Today you cut off one member of the party, tomorrow another, the next day a third, and soon what will be left of our party?¹⁹⁶

Stalin fought his opponents with deeds, not words. Many years later the phrase "salami tactics" became famous. Stalin deprived his opponents of power little by little, cutting off tiny slices, one at a time. In January 1925 Trotsky was removed as commissar of war, after which he lost the support of the army apparatus, especially with the removal of his close ally Antonov- Ovseenko as head of the Political Directorate of the Red Army. Similarly, Kamenev was removed as head of the Moscow party organization at the end of 1925.

But Stalin also used words to fight his enemies. He had no trouble showing that they were unprincipled politicians, that at one time they had supported and defended Stalin only to turn against him later and say, as Kamenev did at the Fourteenth Congress: "We are against the creation of a 'Leader.'... I suggest that our general secretary is not a figure who can unite the Old Bolshevik general staff around himself." In reply to demands for party democracy, Mikoyan defended Stalin with the acid comment that when the Oppositionists were in power they were against democracy, but when they went into opposition they suddenly became its champions. Stalin himself did not hesitate to remind those who called for democracy of their own past.

In the ranks of the Opposition there are people like Beloborodov whose "democratism" is still remembered by the workers of Rostov; Rozengolts, whose "democratism" was visited upon our water and rail transport workers; Pyatakov, whose "democratism" made the Donbass region not only yell but scream;... and Byk, whose "democratism" still makes Khorezm scream.¹⁹⁷

During the power struggle of the 1920s a method of debating developed in which Stalin showed himself a past master. This system, essentially a semantic one, was an extremely important factor in enabling Stalin to defeat his opponents. Lenin deserves credit for developing this semantic system in 1903, when he called his group the Bolsheviks (majority supporters) when in fact they were in the minority on all but one question at the Second Party Congress. In the polemics that constantly shook the party from 1903 to 1917 (and after), Lenin always sought to pin a discrediting label on his opponents rather than defeat them by argument.

In the debates of 1923—1928 the adversaries constantly juggled labels and special terms such as "leftist," "rightist," "centrist," and "general line." Stalin demonstrated great virtuosity in this semantic game. The opponents of the "general line," which was constantly changing, could be accused of leftist views with rightist deviations or of a right deviation with leftist tendencies. Two new concepts were also created: "Leninism," a system of views that were always correct; and 'Trotskyism," a system of views that was always hostile to Leninism. Any inappropriate phrase spoken by chance or out of carelessness became a crime. Stalin's first shot fired against his fellow triumvirs, a month after the Thirteenth Congress, was an attack on Kamenev, who had spoken of Nepmans Russia rather than NEP Russia. "Does Kamenev understand the principled difference here?" Stalin asked in his comradely way. "Of course he understands it. Why then did he put forward this strange slogan? Because of his characteristic dis­regard for theory and precise theoretical definitions."¹⁹®

Every line was put through a strainer. Every word uttered by an opponent was reinterpreted, distorted, and falsified.

The best exammple of the semantic game Stalin played was his reduction of the dispute with Trotsky to a question of two slogans: "socialism in one country" and "permanent revolution." Lenin and all the other leaders had believed that the sparks of the Russian revolution would touch off a world­wide conflagration. After that would come the building of the radiant future. On March 12, 1919, Lenin said exactly that: 'The tasks of construction depend entirely on how swiftly the revolution wins out in the main European countries. Only after that victory will we be able to undertake the tasks of construction in a serious way."¹⁹⁹ On November 6, 1920, he was even more categorical: "In one country it is impossible to achieve such a task as the socialist revolution."²⁰⁰

After the failure of the revolution in Europe, especially the fumbled attempts to start a revolutionary fire in Germany in 1923, all of the Bol­sheviks understood that they had to build something in Russia. In late 1924, on the basis of a single sentence found in a 1915 article by Lenin, Stalin declared that it was possible and necessary to "build socialism in a single country," the Soviet Union. It was not enough, however, to formulate this positive program; he contrasted it to a negative program, which he called "the Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution." Long before the 1917 revolution Trotsky had put forward the theory that the Russian rev­olution would inevitably "pass over" from a bourgeois democratic to a socialist revolution and that its ultimate fate would depend on the world revolution, which was also inevitable. In full agreement with Lenin, Trotsky believed that only assistance from the victorious world proletariat would make it possible to consolidate the victory of the Russian proletariat.

In 1924 the question of the transition from bourgeois democratic to socialist revolution was purely of historical interest. But Stalin used the

old formula of "permanent revolution" to construct the demon theory of Trotskyism, which allegedly denied the possibility of building socialism in the Soviet Union.

The debate between Stalin and Trotsky took place on two different levels. Trotsky argued theoretically in the traditional style of Marxist scholasticism. He agreed that the process of building socialism could begin in the Soviet Union, but he thought it impossible for the process to be completed within a single country. Stalin, for his part, avoided the fine points of theory, arguing in practical terms. He defended "Leninism" against 'Trotskyism." He defended the honor of the Russian proletariat against Trotsky, who supposedly had no faith in its capacities. He made it clear that the policy of "building socialism in one country" meant a peaceful, constructive life, while "permanent revolution" would mean new wars and revolutions. Trot­sky's defeat was inevitable. Bled white by its suffering, the country longed for peace.

This debate was typical of all the internal disputes in the party from 1923 to 1928. There were no clear differences of principle, as can be seen from the content of the discussions and the ease with which the adversaries changed their minds and shifted from one camp to another. The real dif­ference between Stalin and all of his opponents was the way they debated and their attitude toward dogma. Many factors contributed to Stalin's victory, but the most important was the inner weakness of his opponents, unable as they were to free themselves of the dogmas by which they were bound. This was especially true of Trotsky, the most outstanding of Stalin's rivals, but none of them were able to overcome the prejudices of old fashioned Marxism. Stalin, Lenin's best disciple, was a Marxist of a new type, a Marxist of the twentieth century, possibly even the twenty-first.

In many respects Trotsky and Stalin were twins. Their attitude toward party democracy was the same. Trotsky wrote in November 1930: "What we mean by the restoration of party democracy is that the real, revolutionary, proletarian core of the party must win the right to curb the bureaucracy and to carry out a genuine purge of the party."²⁰¹ He went on to specify all the elements that had to be purged, quite a long list. Trotsky's and Lenin's attitudes toward democracy in society were also the same. Trotsky wrote in November 1932:

The regime of the proletarian dictatorship cannot and does not wish to hold back from infringing the principles and formal rules of democracy. It has to be judged from the standpoint of its capacity to ensure the transition to a new society. A bourgeois democratic regime, on the other hand, must be judged from the standpoint of the extent to which it allows the class struggle to develop within the framework of democracy.²⁰²

The dictatorship of the proletariat was not bound by any "formal rules of democracy," but the democratic regime must allow its enemies to fight against it.

In principle Trotsky's attitude toward culture was also the same as Sta­lin's. Writing in exile in June 1933, Trotsky granted that "the party is obliged to permit a very extensive liberty in the field of art," but he added, "eliminating pitilessly only that which is directed against the revolutionary tasks of the proletariat."²⁰³ Lastly, their attitude toward morality was the same. 'The means can only be justified by the end," Trotsky wrote. "But the end must also be justified. From the point of view of Marxism, which expresses the historical interests of the proletariat, the end is justified if it increases humanity's power over nature and contributes to eliminating the power of man over man."²⁰⁴ From the standpoint of this morality (if it can be called that), Trotsky justified the murder of the tsar's children but condemned the murder of his own children by Stalin, because Stalin was not a true representative of the proletariat.²⁰⁵

Trotsky was hopelessly outpaced by Stalin because Trotsky continued to believe in certain unshakable truths, for example, that the proletariat was a class with a historical mission to perform and that there were certain invariable historical laws that would specifically ensure the victory of Trot­sky, who represented the true interests of the proletariat. He also believed in the party as the only instrument history had provided for the proletariat. His faith in these eternal truths bound Trotsky and the entire Opposition hand and foot and prevented them from using all the means at their disposal for fighting Stalin. To them, Stalin in the last analysis represented the party, and thus the proletariat and the laws of history. Stalin did not have any such complexes. He knew that he was right because he had the power, and that meant that anything was permitted.

A central topic of debate was the NEP. The question under discussion was this: What economic levers could the state use to obtain the resources necessary for industrial development when agriculture remained almost entirely in private hands? Until 1925 all the party leaders had agreed with the policy of smychka, the alliance with the peasantry. As a British historian noted, "If anyone in January 1925 had been acute enough to predict an imminent break between Stalin and Zinoviev on this issue, he would almost certainly have seen in Zinoviev the prospective champion of a peasant policy and Stalin and its opponent."²⁰⁶ Even Trotsky in the fall of 1925 acknowledged that there was nothing threatening about the economic pro­cesses underway in the countryside, and he denounced any policy of "de- kulakization" at that time.²⁰⁷

Bukharin was the chief ideologist of the NEP and he defended it against

the attacks, first Trotsky's, then Zinoviev's and Kamenev's. But he was not opposed in principle to violence and exploitation. In 1920 Bukharin had advocated nationalization of all economic activities, militarization of labor, and rationing for everyone—in short, the universal use of force in regulating the economy.

Just as Stalin had "construed" Trotsky's political program in his own way, by reducing it to the slogan of permanent revolution and investing his own, Stalinist, meaning in that slogan, so too an economic program was devised for the United Opposition. A report by Preobrazhensky, 'The Fun­damental Law of Socialist Accumulation," was said to be the essence of the Opposition's economic point of view. Preobrazhensky argued that the October revolution was premature in the sense that Russia had not yet reached the necessary level of capitalist development, that what Marx called the stage of "primitive accumulation of capital" had not been completed. In other words, Russia did not yet have the industrial base necessary for material goods to be distributed "to each according to his needs." The capitalists had accomplished their primitive accumulation through the ex­ploitation of colonies. According to Preobrazhensky, primitive socialist accumulation, which was necessary for the building of a socialist industry, would have to take place at the expense of the lower forms of economic life, in particular that "internal colony," the peasantry.²⁰⁸

Preobrazhensky's ties with Trotsky provided a splendid opportunity for Stalin to attribute the primitive accumulation theory to the Opposition as a whole. Growing numbers of Oppositionists leaned toward such extreme views, especially those like Kamanev and Zinoviev who based themselves in Leningrad and Moscow, where the workers were discontented with the social inequities produced by the NEP. They were inclined in this direction also because of the moderate position of Stalin and his associates, who argued for a program of "civil peace," as Bukharin did at the Fourteenth Party Congress.²⁰⁹ Even Stalin asked whether there was any need for class warfare "now that we have the dictatorship of the proletariat and now that the party and trade union organizations function with full freedom." The general secretary answered his own question. "Of course not."²¹⁰

Bukharin's program, supported by Stalin, stated that war against the peasantry would be fraught with fatal consequences, both political and economic, for the Soviet state. That was why economic development had to be based on an alliance with the peasants, providing them the opportunity to increase their productivity, organize cooperatives, and develop forms of exchange through the market. On April 17, 1925, Bukharin uttered the famous words: "We must tell the peasants, all the peasants, enrich your­selves. Develop your plots of land and don't be concerned about being pressured."²¹¹ Later when Stalin began manufacturing a "right deviation," he chose these words of Bukharin's as the essence of the deviationists' program.

Bukharin's words provoked indignation among Oppositionists. Among the peasants they aroused hope. One man, a keen observer who considered himself the unofficial "loyal opposition," greeted them enthusiastically. This was Nikolai Ustryalov, whom Stalin called the "spokesman for the bourgeois specialists in our country."²¹²

Ustryalov had no doubt that a new period in Soviet history had begun, one more step toward the emancipation of Russia from alien internationalist ideas. He also had no doubt that this period was crucially linked with the name of Stalin, whom Ustryalov regarded as Lenin's true disciple, he who had grasped Lenin's doctrine "dynamically," as befits the teachings of a master dialectician. Ustryalov proclaimed the "twilight of the Leninist Old Guard," noting that the former "masters and favorites of the revolution, the October guard, the stalwarts of the iron cohort, the pride and glory of the proletarian vanguard," had been dethroned.²¹³ In October 1926 Us­tryalov declared, "Not only are we now 'Against Zinoviev'; we are definitely Tor Stalin.'"²¹⁴ Ustryalov did not delude himself about his new hero; he quoted the "wise words" of Konstantin Leontiev: "Good people are not infrequently worse than bad people. It is known to happen. Personal honesty may be pleasing on the personal level and may inspire respect, but there is nothing political or organizational about these fragile qualities. Very good people sometimes do terrible damage to the state."²¹⁵ From his peaceful nineteenth-century vantage point, Leontiev could not of course have imag­ined what terrible damage the bad people would do.

Ustryalov hailed Stalin's victory because he saw him as Lenin's true disciple. As early as 1923 Ustryalov had described Lenin and Mussolini as two equally important figures who "for all their political polarity... mark a new stage in the evolution of modern Europe."²¹⁶ In 1926 Stalin too was marking a new stage in European history as he marched inexorably toward full personal power within the party—and consequently within the state.

The Fourteenth Party Congress, in December 1925, brought an end to the interregnum, the period of "collective leadership." Three years earlier, Lenin's appearance before the Fourteenth Comintern Congress was de­scribed this way: 'The applause is joyful and stormy because it has seemed a very long wait. ... The entire auditorium sings the Internationale—be­cause the applause, the ovation, seemed insufficient to express the bound­less love for the leader and the limitless faith in him."²¹⁷ In December 1925 Stalin's speech to the party congress was greeted by "applause swelling to an ovation; all the delegates rose and sang the Internationale."

Stalin began consolidating his power at once. Kamenev and Zinoviev were removed from their posts in the Moscow and Leningrad party orga­nizations, and Kamenev was demoted from full to alternate member of the Politburo. After the congress Kirov was sent to Leningrad to "restore order" there. In 1926 Zinoviev, Trotsky, and Kamenev were removed from the Politburo.

Stalin made use of every means to consolidate his power, including the art of medicine. In October 1925, by order of the Politburo, Commissar of War Frunze underwent an operation. (An ally of Zinoviev's, Frunze had replaced Trotsky as commissar of war a few months earlier.) The surgeons discovered that the ulcer they were ordered to remove had scarred over. The surgery was unnecessary, but the patient never rose from the operating table. He was replaced as commissar of war by Stalin's crony Voroshilov. At Frunze's funeral Stalin pronounced these mysterious words: "Perhaps this is the way, just this easily and simply, that all the old comrades should be lowered into their graves."²¹⁸

Zinoviev and Kamenev, forced out of all their posts, proposed an alliance to their old enemy Trotsky. The United Opposition of 1926—1927 criticized Stalin for making concessions to the kulaks, refusing to industrialize the country, and bureaucratizing the state apparatus. This criticism of Stalin's policies, however, could not save the Opposition because it suffered from an inherent weakness.

The Fifteenth Party Congress, entirely dominated by the Stalinists, was held in December 1927 after a two-year interval, the first time that a congress had not been held once a year since the party had come to power. At the congress Kamenev gave a speech of repentance in which he said there were only two possible roads. One was the creation of a second party. "This road, under the conditions of proletarian dictatorship, would be disastrous for the revolution. ... This road is closed to us, forbidden, ruled out by our entire system of ideas, by all of Lenin's teachings on the dic­tatorship of the proletariat." The other road was "to submit wholly and entirely to the party." "We have chosen this road," said Kamenev, "because we are deeply convinced that a correct Leninist policy can triumph only within our party and through it, not outside it or against it."²¹⁹ Trotsky himself, even after being deported from the Soviet Union in February 1929, held the same position, that the Soviet state was still the historical instru­ment of the working class.

Capitulation did not save the Oppositionists. Kamenev and 121 other

Opposition leaders were expelled from the party by the Fifteenth Congress. Some had already been arrested. Rykov concluded a speech at the congress with these words: "I don't think we can guarantee that the prison population will not have to be increased somewhat in the near future."²²⁰ Ten years later, while sitting in prison, he may have regretted those words.

To the Opposition s objections that Stalin was using terror against party members, the general secretary replied: "Yes, we are arresting them and we will continue to. ... Some say that in the history of our party such incidents have never been seen before. Untrue. What about the Myasnikov group? And the Workers' Truth group? Who does not know that the members of those groups were arrested with the full agreement of Zinoviev, Trotsky, and Kamenev?"²²¹

The Fifteenth Congress ended the dispute over the succession to Lenin and definitively answered the question, Who will prevail? Over a period of five years Stalin had carried out what Boris Souvarine called his "mo­lecular coup (ГёЬаЬ."²²² He assumed the mantle of Lenin.

WHAT TO DO ABOUT CULTURE?

In April 1918 some representatives of the newly organized Union of Activists in the Arts gathered at the home of Maxim Gorky for a meeting with the commissar of education, Anatoly Lunacharsky, an occasional dramatist and literary critic in his own right. They proposed that the executive committee of their union be placed in charge of the arts instead of the existing col­legium, or board, of the Commissariat of Education. In other words, they wanted artists to administer the arts. Lunacharsky responded: "We were against the Constituent Assembly in the political arena. We are all the more opposed to a Constituent Assembly in the arts."²²³

The party announced its intention to administer art and culture directly. This involved two elements: (1) what artists should not write, paint, sculpt, etc.; and (2) what they should. The first part of this program was easy to carry out. Press censorship was introduced immediately after the revolution, in November 1917. Then after the civil war, on June 8, 1922, the Council of People s Commissars announced the formation of a Main Press Com­mittee, whose purpose was to "unify all existing forms of censorship in Russia." Two months later a government decree established the Main Lit­erature and Art Administration (Glavnoe Upravlenie po Delam Literatury i Iskusstva), which became famous under the acronym Glavlit as the main Soviet censorship agency over the years and which exists to this day. The duties of Glavlit, according to its founding decree, included "prior ex­amination of all literary works, periodical and nonperiodical publications, maps, etc., intended for publication and distribution." In addition, Clavlit was to "issue all official authorizations for printed works of any kind, prepare lists of banned books, and work out provisions governing printing estab­lishments, libraries, and the book trade."²²⁴

The second part of the program was harder to implement. Practical experience with ways of pressuring artists into doing what the party required had not yet accumulated.

First of all, the party had to assert its inalienable right to act as the sole authority in cultural matters. A challenger to this right was a group that called itself Proletkult, short for Proletarian Cultural and Educational Organization. Its leader, the ex-Bolshevik Aleksandr Bogdanov, had worked out the theory of an autonomous proletarian culture even before the revo­lution. He held that the "organizational principle of the bourgeoisie" was individualism and that therefore bourgeois culture was individualistic. The organizational principle of the proletariat was collectivism. The proletariat had to reexamine all previously existing culture from this point of view, reevaluate it, and take control of it. The proletariat would then transform all old science and scholarship and create a new "universal organizational science," which would enable it to "organize all human existence in a harmonious and complete fashion." After the February revolution, the sup­porters of Proletkult announced themselves as an independent worker's organization—independent, that is, of the Provisional Government's Min­istry of Education. After the October revolution numerous Proletkult circles, studios, and laboratories were organized for industrial workers who wanted to paint, write poetry, or take to the stage. Proletkult published books and pamphlets, held conferences, and opened what it called the Proletarian University in Moscow. The work of "creating a proletarian culture" had begun.

Lenin declared war on Proletkult. Bad enough that it was led by his former friend Bogdanov, who had become a dangerous enemy, a man whose philosophical writings Lenin never ceased to denounce; in addition, Pro­letkult was seeking "to wall itself off from the party's leadership."²²⁵ Bog­danov held that "Proletkult was the class organization of the proletariat for culture and the creative arts just as the workers' party was its political organization and the trade union was its economic organization." Lenin answered that the proletariat has only one organization, the party, which "guides and directs not only in politics but also in economics and cul­ture."²²⁶ In 1919 the Proletarian University in Moscow was closed down, particularly because a course in Bogdanov's "organizational science" had been given there. In its place a so-called Communist University was founded. In October 1920 the Politburo took up the question of Proletkult three times. At the session on October 9, Lenin spoke nine times on the question; so did another expert on culture, Stalin.²²⁷

On December 1, 1920, Pravda published a letter by the Central Com­mittee on the subject of Proletkult. This was the first in an endless series of Central Committee pronouncements on cultural questions. Proletkult was stripped of its autonomy, and Communist party members were removed from the central committee of Proletkult and obliged to acknowledge the guiding role of their party and its leadership in this sphere. The letter expressed the Central Committee's views on other cultural questions as well: for example, that futurism reflected "perverse and absurd tastes." Soon after the publication of this letter Proletkult renounced its former ties with the futurists and passed a resolution stating that "futurism and comm- futurism are ideological currents characteristic of the final phase of bour­geois culture in the age of imperialism" and therefore must be recognized as "hostile to the proletariat as a class."²²⁸

The death of Alexander Blok marked the end of an era, the collapse of faith in the revolution on the part of the intelligentsia, the demise of hope. "Life has changed," Blok wrote in his diary on April 17, 1921. Earlier he had written 'The Twelve," a poem in which Christ led the revolutionaries into the future. Now he wrote, "Throughout the world, the louse has con­quered and everything will go a different way now, not the way we used to live, the way we loved."²²⁹ At his last public appearance, a meeting in honor of the eighty-fourth anniversary of Pushkin's death, Blok spoke of the poet's mission: 'They also take away peace and liberty... not outward peace, but the inner calm of creativity. Not juvenile libertinism... but creative freedom, a secret inner liberty. And the poet dies because he can no longer breathe; life has lost its meaning."²³⁰ Within a few months Blok himself died, and his death was quite symbolic. On May 29, 1921, Gorky addressed a letter to Lunacharsky: "Would you please ask the Politburo as quickly as possible to give permission for Blok to leave for Finland." Twelve days later Lunacharsky passed on the request in behalf of Blok, who was seriously ill. The next day the Politburo discussed the question and passed a resolution to "improve the food situation for Alexander Blok." Blok's condition worsened. On July 23 the Politburo agreed to allow the poet to leave the country but would not give permission for his wife to accompany him. The poet was in no condition to travel by himself. On July 29 Gorky sent a telegram to the Kremlin addressed to Lunacharsky: "Urgent. Con­dition extremely serious. Immediate departure for Finland indispensable."

On August 1 Lunacharsky again raised the question with the Central Com­mittee. This time the authorization was granted.²³¹

On August 7 Blok died at the age of forty. Weeks had passed since Gorky's initial letter. It is common knowledge that it was Lenin who decided questions involving departure from the Soviet Republic by people prominent in science and culture.

Neither the fact that most intellectuals protested against the October revolution nor that numerous cultural figures went into exile stopped the progress in the arts that had been going on in Russia since the turn of the century. Not even the lack of essential materials, such as paints and canvas for artists, marble for sculptors and architects, and paper for writers, stopped this powerful creative impulse. Andrei Bely wrote: "In its most difficult days Russia became like a garden of nightingales. Poets sprang up as never before. People barely had the strength to live but they were all singing."²³² However, as Lenin explained to Clara Zetkin, the task of the party was to direct this spontaneous artistic and cultural outpouring into a constructive channel serving the state and to bring it under the control of party insti­tutions.²³³ Viktor Shklovsky jotted down this note at the time: "Art must move organically, like the heart in the human breast, but they want to regulate it like a train."²³⁴

The task of regulating art fell to party members who were connected with one or another artistic endeavor. Proletarian writers and proletarian artists became cultural leaders. The magazine of the proletarian writers, appro­priately enough, was named On Guard (Na postu).

In 1923 Trotsky coined a phrase for designating nonproletarian writers and artists who wanted to live and work in the Soviet Republic but were not fully qualified to do so (in the eyes of the party); he called them fellow travelers (poputchiki). Those writers and artists who were not classed as outright enemies could be granted the designation poputchik, but there was a thin line between "enemy" and "fellow traveler." Maxim Gorky, who had left the country and who was regarded with hostility by the proletarian writers, was classed as a fellow traveler. So was Mayakovsky, although one of Pravdas leading journalists, Lev Sosnovsky, denounced Mayakovsky in 1921 for having dared to take "our very old comrade Svortsov-Stepanov" to court because he had "refused in his capacity as director of the State Publishing House, Gosizdat, to pay royalties on some futurist nonsense published in a theatrical journal." The article concluded unequivocally, "So you want to fool around, Messieurs Futurists? We will see that your inappropriate and costly fooling comes to an end."²³⁵

This was not the first warning to the fellow travelers. They had been warned by the shooting of Gumilev, the death of Blok, and the deportation of many leading intellectuals from the country; and they had been threatened repeatedly with the "stern whip of the dictatorship" in newspaper and magazine articles. On February 27, 1922, the Orgburo passed a resolution "on the struggle against petit bourgeois ideology in the field of literature and publishing."²³⁶ This was the second Central Committee pronouncement on cultural questions. It indicated what should and should not be published. In particular it authorized the printing of works by a group of young writers who had formed the first literary association after the revolution, the Se- rapion Brothers, but only on the condition that "the latter do not contribute to any reactionary publications." Which publications were reactionary, of course, was decided solely by the party.

The danger to culture and free creative activity was first pointed out by Evgeny Zamyatin, who was also the first to disclose the real nature of the October revolution as the beginning of a new era. "We have lived through the epoch of suppression of the masses," he wrote in 1920. "We are living in an epoch of suppression of the individual in the name of the masses."²³⁷ With the foresight of genius he wrote the novel We, in which he described the Only State, the state of the future, in which there is only one individual, the Benefactor, and in which the citizens are mere numbers. In this state, where the citizens' capacity to fantasize has been surgically removed so that they can become just like machines, the fate of literature, art, and culture is foreordained. "How is it possible," asks the hero of the novel, "that the ancients did not see as plain as day the total absurdity of their literature and poetry? The grand and majestic power of the written word was spent for nothing. It was simply ridiculous. Everyone wrote whatever came to mind."²³⁸ In Zamyatin's negative Utopia, literature is a branch of the civil service. Ten or fifteen years later Zamyatin's terrible prophecy became a reality. Today it seems like a commonplace, but in 1920 the idea of a "state literature" was an entirely new concept.

Zamyatin was the most consistent and fearless defender of creative free­dom. He issued his warning about the threat to culture not in We, whose publication was banned, but in an article entitled "I Am Afraid," in which he said,

True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trust­worthy officials, but by madmen, misfits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics. But when a writer must be sensible and rigidly orthodox,... there can be no literature cast in bronze, there can be only a paper literature, a newspaper literature, which is read today and used for wrapping soap to­morrow. ²³⁹

Zamyatin was not alone. The painter Kazimir Malevich, one of the world's first abstract artists, insisted on the independence of the arts.

All social and economic relations do violence to art. ... Whether a portrait is being painted of some socialist or some emperor, whether a mansion is being built for a businessman or a humble dwelling for a worker—these differences cannot be taken as the starting point for art. ... It is about time we understood at last that the problems of art and the problems of the belly are extremely remote from one another.²⁴⁰

The old Russian writer Vikenty Veresaev also complained: "Our creative work is being done more and more on two levels—one that we write for ourselves, the other for publication."²⁴¹ Even Aleksandr Zharov, the bard of the Young Communist League, who was more devoted to the party than anyone, expressed regret: "I'm not allowed to sing sad songs. A mark would go against me on my party card."

By the the mid-1920s voices of protest became less frequent and more discreet. It was harder for them to break into print, but the voices praising the policies of the party and the shackling of literature grew louder and more triumphant. At his last public appearance, Alexander Blok, still very hesitantly, pointed to a phenomenon he found astonishing. He contrasted the youthful volubility of the radical critic Belinsky, who continued Push­kin's rebellious tradition in Russian literature, to the polite restraint of Chief of Gendarmes Count Benckendorff, who on behalf of Tsar Nicholas I helped harass Pushkin and drive him to his grave. Blok said that he always believed the Belinskys were totally opposed and totally hostile to the Benckendorffs and it would be terribly painful if that turned out not to be so.²⁴² But Blok was not mistaken. The Soviet Belinskys were turning into Soviet Benckendorffs, and although they did not have the polite voice of the chief of gendarmes, they outstripped him by far in the techniques of repression.

A leading Soviet literary critic of the early 1920s, Petr Kogan, declared:

For a long time to come the revolution must forget about the end for the sake of the means, must get rid of the dream of freedom so that discipline will not be weakened. A splendid yoke, not of gold but of steel, solid and organized—that is the new element the revolution has brought in for now. Instead of a yoke of gold a yoke of steel. Whoever does not understand that this is the only road to emancipation does not understand anything about current events.²⁴³

Kogan sang the glories of the yoke of steel in full seriousness, not knowing that Zamyatin had already predicted such things in his novel We. The Only State had launched a spaceship with the following assignment: "Your mis­sion is to subject to the beneficial yoke of reason all unknown beings in inhabiting other planets, beings perhaps still living in the wild state of freedom. If they fail to understand that we bring them mathematically infallible happiness, our duty will be to force them to be happy."²⁴⁴ Petr Kogan is the same literary critic who noted with approval the "exceptional interest the imaginative literature of today is showing in the Cheka and the Chekists," that is, the security police agencies and their agents.²⁴⁵ 'The Chekist," Kogan said, "is a symbol of an almost inhuman decisiveness, a being who does not have the right to normal human feelings, such as pity, love, and doubt. He is an instrument of steel in the hands of history."²⁴⁶ With this instrument of steel a party could carry out its historical task— forcing people to be happy.

The year 1925, which was marked by the death of another writer, the suicide of Sergei Esenin, was the high point of the NEP in culture as well as politics and economics. Through the force of inertia the powerful wave of innovation in the arts begun at the turn of the century continued. Besides that, social cataclysms have always been fertile ground for literature, and it would be difficult to imagine greater cataclysms than the combination of war and revolution from 1914 to 1922. Another factor favorable to the arts was the internal dispute in the party, which occupied the attention of the leaders and diverted them from working out a single clear line for bringing culture to heel.

The conjunction of all these factors created opportunities for development in the figurative arts, theater, the cinema, and literature that were never to occur again. The experiments in form, language, and subject matter of the writers Andrei Bely and Velemir Khlebnikov and the renovation of the literary language carried out by Remizov and Zamyatin, in combination with numerous topics not dealt with before in literature, produced such remarkable prose writers as Boris Pilnyak, Isaac Babel, and Vsevolod Ivanov, and such poets as Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pas­ternak, and Marina Tsvetaeva. In the theater this was the age of Meyerhold, the herald of an October-style revolution in the theater; Tairov, the pro­ponent of what he called chamber theater; and Forreger, the film experi­mentalist, and his prot6ge, Sergei Eisenstein. Likewise, Lev Kuleshov and Dziga Vertov created a new kind of poetics for a new medium, the cinema.

After 1925 Stalin's position as top leader of the party was no longer in doubt. More attention was now paid to literature, and a general line was proclaimed in cultural matters. In February 1925 the Moscow Committee of the party called a conference to take up the question of the intelligentsia. This was the last occasion on which members of the intelligentsia were able to express their views publicly and have an exchange of opinion with the party leadership. Lunacharsky and Bukharin represented the party, and the intelligentsia was represented by Academician Pavel Sakulin, a re­nowned literary historian, and Yuri Klyuchnikov, a writer and supporter of the changing landmarks point of view. The fate of the intelligentsia and freedom of thought were the topic for discussion. Lunacharsky presented the main report and indicated that the party had "no fixed and final, indisputable, ready-made opinion on the fate of the intelligentsia."²⁴⁷ The party had a goal, "to persuade or to force" the intelligentsia to work with the proletariat. Lunacharsky quoted Lenin, "If persuasion does not work, force must be used."²⁴⁸

Academician Sakulin responded first of all that the better part of the Russian intelligentsia could never regard the revolution as alien because the intelligentsia itself had "nurtured the dream of political freedom and social equality."²⁴⁹ Secondly, he hoped that "during the time when war communism was dominant, before it was terminated by the course of events, the position of the intelligentsia was very difficult."²⁵⁰ By this he did not mean their material situation but the ideological and methodological dic­tatorship which the Central Committee had proclaimed over education and scientific research.²⁵¹ Addressing the party and the government, Sakulin then presented the main demand of those intellectuals who wanted to work with the revolutionary authorities: 'There should be no claim to a monopoly on the truth. ... The essence of the truth is that it requires freedom in education and research, and competing schools of scientific thought."²⁵²

Klyuchnikov presented a different position, the changing landmarks view: "Since the Soviet government is fighting for its ideals under conditions of tremendously hostile encirclement and since it can transform ruined Russia into a mighty power only if its ideals are victorious," the intellectual outside the party has "no alternative but to recognize that his fate must be to submit."²⁵³ Klyuchnikov contended that for the intellectual to do creative work he must be placed in an appropriate environment enabling him to be creative. But political freedom was not necessary. 'To give that to us intellectuals outside the party, even those who are marching firmly in step with the Soviet authorities, would be dangerous. We would just shoot off our mouths."²⁵⁴ The stenographic record at this point records applause. The intellectuals present in the great hall of the Moscow Conservatory apparently agreed that they would all just shoot off their mouths if they were given political freedom.

Bukharin's speech at this conference showed that the Soviet government had no intention of granting any freedom. The man whom Lenin had called the "favorite of the party" and who at that time was acting as chief theorist for the Stalinist majority, was frank and open. "Freedom in education is a

sophism," he said.²⁵⁵ Such categories as the people, good, and freedom were mere verbal badges, empty shells.²⁵⁶ The party had come to power "by marching over corpses. For this it had to have not only nerves of steel but also a knowledge of the road history had marked out for us, based on Marxist analysis."²⁵⁷ The party's victory had confirmed the accuracy and correctness of Marxist ideology. The party would not renounce the hegemony of Marxism because "it is the most powerful weapon in our hands, allowing us to build what we want."²⁵⁸ "In particular," Bukharin declared, "it is essential to us that intellectual cadres be trained in an ideologically precise way. Yes, we will produce standardized intellectuals, produce them as though in a factory."²⁵⁹

A few months after this conference the Central Committee's press de­partment held a conference on party policies in regard to literature. Thus the Central Committee was proceeding from a definition of the general line to a specific application of its policy toward the most important section of the intelligentsia, the writers.

There was no single, unified point of view. The proletarian writers, who had formed the so-called October Group and had published the magazine On Guard since 1923, called for a big stick policy in relation to the fellow travelers. The fellow travelers were mainly published in a magazine called Red Virgin Soil (Krasnaya nov), run by the Old Bolshevik Aleksandr Vo- ronsky. It was revealed by Vardin, a leader of the On Guard group, that "in 1921 Comrade Voronsky was given certain directives and certain re­sources in order to keep a certain group of writers in Soviet Russia. ... At the time we had to be careful that the Pilnyaks would not defect to the Whites."²⁶⁰ Voronsky's view was that since proletarian literature did not exist, the party had to give the fellow travelers "a moral working-over," to paraphrase Lenin. This line had Trotsky's support as well. He did not think proletarian literature would have time to come into existence because the period of proletarian dictatorship would be too short. Bukharin on the other hand upheld the theory of socialism in one country and favored the de­velopment of proletarian literature. He believed it was necessary to reed­ucate some of the fellow travelers and get rid of the others.

At the Central Committee conference of July 1925 two different policies were advanced. Voronsky proposed that the party abstain from adopting the viewpoint of any one literary current and instead aid all the revolutionary groupings while prudently seeking to orient them. Vardin proposed that the party install the dictatorship of the party in literature and that the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) be the instrument of that dic­tatorship. As to the fellow travelers, he favored the establishment of a "literary Cheka." A letter signed by thirty-seven prominent Soviet writers

was read to the conference. Among the signers were Aleksei Tolstoy, Isaac Babel, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and Sergei Esenin. The writers spoke of their close ties with post-October Soviet Russia, confessed their own errors, but at the same time complained about the attacks upon them by the On Guard group, which was presenting its views as though they were the views of the party as a whole. This letter was a totally new phenomenon. Writers were asking the party for protection, addressing it as a supreme arbiter.

The resolution of the Central Committee combined both points of view on how to control literature. Everyone agreed on the main thing, that it was up to the party to identify without fail the "social and class essence of all literary currents" and to exercise its authority over them.²⁶¹ The only disagreement was over what kind of sauce to cook the fellow travelers in.

The majority of Soviet writers who felt that they were suffering under the tutelage of the On Guard group accepted the Central Committee res­olution as a charter of liberties for the writer. Only a few understood its real meaning. Pasternak commented that the country was not going through a cultural revolution but a "cultural reaction."²⁶² Osip Mandelstam, as his widow Nadezhda tells us in her memoir Hope Against Hope, understood that the noose would be tightened more and more around the neck of literature. There were even some who found the idea of a "literary Cheka" entrancing. Mayakovsky spoke on October 2, 1926, during a discussion on the Soviet government's theatrical policy. He called for legal reprisals against Mikhail Bulgakov for his play The Days of the Turbins, which depicted the Whites rather favorably. It had been staged by the Moscow Art Theater. "Accidentally, and to the great joy of the bourgeois, we gave Bulgakov a chance to whine and squeal—and whine he did, but we won't let him again."²⁶³ Mayakovsky totally identified himself with those who would decide whether or not to allow writers to whine and squeal. The former rebel poet had become a hunter of heretics.

After the Central Committee resolution, power in the fields of literature, art, and theater gradually passed into the hands of the On Guard group, to those who were commonly called "the frenzied zealots."

CHAPTER

—4

IN PURSUIT OF CONFLICT, 1926-1928

THE DEATH OF NEP

Historians disagree on exactly when the NEP ended, but it began to die out in late 1926. The "grain procurement crises" of 1927 and 1928—sharp reductions in peasant deliveries of grain to the state—were the visible symptoms of NEP's mortal illness. But sooner or later, one way or another, the NEP was doomed. The Soviet system was not suited to, indeed had not been created for, the resolution of problems through normal, traditional methods under peaceful conditions.

The system had been created by a revolution to carry out a "great leap forward" into Utopia. Under Lenin, during the civil war, primitive but effective forms of government had been worked out: intimidation, open terror, and rule by decree. But they were effective only under crisis con­ditions. Crisis alone permitted the authorities to demand—and obtain— total submission and all necessary sacrifices from its citizens. The system needed sacrifices and sacrificial victims for the good of the cause and the happiness of future generations. Crises enabled the system in this way to build a bridge from the fictional world of Utopian programs to the world of reality.

In the second half of 1926, the NEP began gasping for breath. The 201

restoration of the economy had, for the most part, been accomplished. It became necessary at that point to decide what direction further economic development should take, especially in regard to heavy industry. Bukharin's program, embodied in the slogan, "Enrich yourselves," represented a peaceful, traditional model of development.

During the NEP years N. Valentinov (whose real name was Nikolai Volsky) edited the Commercial-Industrial Gazette, organ of the Supreme Economic Council, the VSNKH. A Bolshevik until 1905, then a Men- shevik, Valentinov-Volsky knew Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders well. In his opinion the "right-wing Communists were following a program parallel to Stolypin's."¹ In other words, Bukharin's program, supported by Stalin in 1925, was similar to the Stolypin land reform, with the difference that Nicholas II's prime minister believed in the permanence of his reform, whereas the 1925 program only temporarily sanctioned private farming on nationalized land.

Bukharin's program had a positive impact on agriculture. As Valentinov- Volsky put it, 'The year 1925 and the first half of 1926 were indeed happy times for the peasantry."² But this period can be called happy only in relative terms: it was better than the preceding one and immeasurably better than the one that followed. Even in this "happy" period the peasants were squeezed by taxes and uncertain what the future would bring. On an income of 250 rubles, a peasant paid as much in taxes as a small busi­nessman or merchant paid on 1,200 rubles or a worker on 3,800.³ For 16.4 kilos of rye in 1913 a peasant could buy 5.48 meters of cloth; for the same amount of rye in June—July 1927 he could buy only 2.55 meters of cloth. The corresponding figures for malt were 103 and 61.9; for sugar, 8.24 and 3.93 pounds.⁴

Still, the peasants were much better off than the workers. Unemployment was increasing, but wages were not. "Nine years after the October revolution the workers in the main branches of our industry do not even dare to dream of their prewar wages."⁵ Discontent over a policy that allowed the peasants to live better than the workers was quite natural. Among rank-and-file party members and lower-level party officials nostalgia for the lost paradise of war communism was felt more and more strongly. "Once there were some brothers named Wright," recalls the hero (one of a group of "the last real Communists," who have gathered in a cave) of "Mahogany," a story by Boris Pilnyak. 'These brothers decided to fly into the sky, and they per­ished, smashed to the ground, after falling from the sky. ... Comrade Lenin has perished, like the Wright brothers. ... What kind of ideas he had no one remembers any more, comrades, except us." Such was the lament of a "Communist called up under war communism, demobilized in 1921. "⁶

In 1928 Artem Vesely published a "demi-short story" called 'The Bare­foot Truth." Some Communists from the Kuban, heroes of the civil war, were writing a letter of complaint to their former commander, Mikhail Vasilievich: "The truth must be spoken plainly—there's more bad in our life than good." They complained of their poverty and the scornful attitude of the Soviet authorities, the bureacratic apparatus, toward them. "The old saying isn't wrong," the veterans complained, bitterly recalled their wartime exploits against the Whites. "As long as the watchdog barked, he was needed. When he got old, he was chased away." They asked a key question: "What did we fight for, Mikhail Vasilievich? For government bureaus or workers' committees?"⁷ The heroes of Vesely's story were not the only ones asking this question or voicing these complaints, as is shown by the fact that the party's Central Committee passed a special resolution on May 8, 1929—the first of its kind—"sharply reprimanding" the editors of the magazine Molodaya gvardiya (Young guard) for publishing "The Barefoot Truth," "a one-sided, tendentious depiction of Soviet reality, essentially a caricature that is objectively beneficial only to our enemies."⁸ For the heroes of 'The Barefoot Truth" the main source of misfortune, the death of the revolution, lay in the fact that "committees were replaced by bu­reaus"—that is, by the bureaucratic apparatus.

The Soviet apparatus—in the government, the state economy, and the party—never stopped growing. By 1928 functionaries numbered 4 million. But this gigantic apparatus, controlled from the center, was incapable of administering the country under normal conditions. "A big fuss is made about the apparatus," wrote Demyan Bedny, the leading "proletarian" poet, in its defense. "But it has to make a devilish effort to get the proletarian steamshhip moving." What's more, this steamship was "towing behind it a huge barge, the peasantry, which is reluctant, sluggish, and intractable."⁹ In fact, the apparatus itself was sluggish and incapable of independent action, consisting as it did of two incompatible elements: unskilled, often illiterate Communist leaders; and the civil servants under them, who trem­bled with fear—a fear the leaders cultivated perennially and systematically.

The only efficient organ of Soviet power was the Cheka-GPU. Whenever something had to be done quickly an "extraordinary commission" was created. This combination of words—it was assumed—could produce re­sults just by itself. For example, Mikoyan relates that in December 1922, when it was necessary to obtain boots and warm clothing, the Council of Labor and Defense established an extraordinary commission for the pro­curement of felt boots (valenki), bast shoes (lapti), and sheepskin coats (polushubki), abbreviated Chekvalap.¹⁰ When an extra effort had to be exerted and a special committee was set up for that purpose, Feliks Dzer- zhinsky, head of the Cheka-GPU, was invariably placed in charge. He directed the rail system, the aid program for homeless children, the Main Labor Committee, and the Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle Against Snowdrifts. When a mass society of Friends of the Soviet Cinema was organized, Dzerzhinsky was chosen its chairman.¹¹ Again, in 1924, when the Society for the Study of Interplanetary Communications was founded, the head of the GPU was not forgotten.¹² This was how they carried out the will of Lenin, who proclaimed that "the Cheka must become an in­strument of discipline such as we succeeded in creating in the Red Army."¹³ On January 31, 1924, Dzerzhinsky was nominated chairman of the Supreme Economic Council, the VSNKH, the body that directed the Soviet economy. "Dzerzhinsky brought the GPU apparatus closer than ever to the tasks of economic construction," his biographer tells us.¹⁴ Valentinov- Volsky, in his memoirs about work at the Vesenkha, portrays Dzerzhinsky as a calm, sober-minded director. The quality that Valentinov valued most in the head of the GPU at the Vesenkha was Dzerzinsky's awareness that he should not frighten those who worked under him. After his death in July 1926 the functionaries at Vesenkha sincerely mourned him. "What a shame that Dzerzhinsky's gone. It was easy to work with him. He appreciated and defended us specialists. Under him we could sleep in peace without fear that the Black Maria would come for us."¹⁵ These lamentations effec­tively convey the atmosphere in the "peaceful years" of the NEP. Dzer­zhinsky's reasonableness was akin to that of the intelligent slavemaster, who knows that slaves represent material value. Nevertheless, the head of the GPU made clear where he stood: "I was named to the Supreme Economic Council. ... I introduced the principle of planning with an iron hand. Some people know very well that I have a very heavy hand which can strike strong blows. I will not permit work to be done as it has been up to now, that is, anarchically."¹⁶

The most important characteristic of the system of rule created by the Communist party was that all problems were considered solely from the point of view of political utility. This applied to the economy as much as to other problems. In the latter part of the NEP the handling of economic problems, as with all questions of "the general line," ran into difficulties that had not existed during war communism, when Lenin's authority swept all disagreements or objections aside, difficulties that would not exist after 1929 either, when Stalin's power would likewise sweep all objections aside.

The difficulties in 1926—1927 consisted mainly in the fact that the United Opposition existed. Trotsky was easily beaten, but his slogans and his criticism of Stalin and Bukharin as "defenders of the kulaks" found an echo in the party, among those who were asking, "Is this what we fought

for?"—among those who remembered the ideals of communism, among workers discontented with their conditions, and among the almost 2 million unemployed.¹⁷ Trotsky's criticisms were reinforced when his former op­ponents Zinoviev and Kamenev joined him. The oppositionists, although excluded from the party apparatus, were still able to air their views in the "Discussion Bulletin" supplement to Pravda, published from time to time during precongress discussions, and to circulate them privately in manu­script form by the method later called samizdat. Within the party it was known not only that Ustryalov praised the policies of Stalin and Bukharin but also that the Mensheviks criticized them sharply from a Marxist view­point, on the grounds that they were leading the country not to communism but "from the old landlord-capitalist economy to a new peasant-capitalist economy."¹⁸

During the entire period of internal struggle in the party only once was a totally new idea proposed. A worker named Yakov Ossovsky, a Communist since 1918, proposed the formation of a second party in the Soviet Union, the creation of a two-party system. As an orthodox Marxist, he believed that the presence of two economic sectors (one private, the other state) made two parties necessary: "As long as we hold to the principle that ours is the only party and that it requires absolute unity," Ossovsky wrote, "a free exchange of opinions in our organizations and party press is not per­mitted, despite the fact that within the party a difference of opinion does exist, owing to the diversity in the economy."¹⁹ Ossovsky was censured by the Central Control Commission and expelled from the party.²⁰ Bukharin declared that open discussion, such as Ossovsky proposed, was imper­missible "because it would shake the very foundations of the proletarian dictatorship, the unity of our party and its dominant position in our country, because it would bring grist to the mill of the groups and splinter groups that are yearning for political democracy."²¹ Even the oppositionists con­demned Ossovsky's proposal. There had never been two parties in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, in the years 1923—1928, the views of the opposition did have an effect on the "general line."

In the fall of 1926 the peasants sharply reduced the sale of grain and other products to the state. Ante Ciliga, a Yugoslav Communist who had arrived in Moscow in 1926 to represent his party, wrote in his memoirs: 'The autumn of 1927 was marked by an occurrence new to me: in the stores there was no meat, no cheese, no milk. Then there began to be interruptions in the sale of bread."²² The crisis in grain deliveries and the attendant difficulties in food supply were taken by Stalin as an occasion to strike a new blow at the opposition. In October 1927, Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the Central Committee. After their attempt to

organize a counterdemonstration on November 7, the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, they and dozens of others were expelled from the party.

Having driven the Opposition leaders out of the party, Stalin began to take over their program and follow their suggestions. To overcome the crisis he resorted to "extraordinary measures." Thirty thousand party members were sent into the countryside to wring grain out of the peasantry. Party leaders, too, traveled into the field. On January 15, 1928, Stalin left Moscow for the Urals and western Siberia. It was the last time he was to travel through the country in that way. Stalin issued some drastic orders to local party officials: in the case of peasants who refused to sell their grain, he told them, article 107 should be applied. This article (added to the Criminal Code in 1927) stipulated imprisonment for one year, with possible confis­cation of property, for anyone who "concealed goods." Poor peasants were invited to join in the search for hidden grain, with 25 percent of the confiscated grain to be distributed to them at a discount or on credit. Stalin's method of collecting grain, the so-called Urals-Siberia method, was extended to the entire country.

The peasants said, "1919 has returned." The roofs of peasant huts were torn off for insufficient deliveries. Military units were sent into the villages to search for hidden grain. It was officially declared that the kulak was to blame for everything. But not long before, Kalinin had written, 'The kulak is a bugbear, a ghost of the old world. This is not a social layer or a group, not even a handful. It's a matter of a few individuals, and they are dying out."²³ Rykov complained: "God only knows what we're doing. To please Trotsky, Pyatakov, and Zinoviev we use the term kulak for the genuine middle peasant who, entirely in accordance with the law, wants to be prosperous."²⁴ In July 1928 Stalin proudly told the Central Committee plenum: "We will press down and gradually squeeze the capitalist elements in the countryside, even if in some cases it brings them to ruin."²⁵

The situation in the Russian countryside at the end of the NEP was neatly summed up by Boris Pilnyak:

The peasants at that time were perplexed by the following problematical dilemma, completely incomprehensible to them. .. . Fifty percent of the peas­ants got up at three in the morning and went to bed at eleven at night, and everyone in the household worked without letup, from the smallest to the largest.... Their huts were in good shape, and so were their wagons. Their cattle were well fed and well cared for. They themselves were well fed and up to their ears in work. They conscientiously paid their tax in kind and other obligations to the state. But the authorities were afraid of them and con­sidered them enemies of the revolution, no more, no less. The other 50

percent of the peasants each had a hut open to the wind, one skinny cow, one mangy sheep, and that was all. ... The state exempted them from the tax in kind, reimbursed them for the cost of sowing, and regarded them as friends of the revolution. The "enemy" peasants maintained that 35 percent of the "friendlies" were drunks,... 5 percent were unlucky,... and 60 per­cent were good-for-nothings, windbags, philosophizers, goof-ofTs, stum- blebums, and clods. The village "enemies" were pressured in every way to become "friendlies," and thus lose the capacity to pay their taxes and let their homes get torn open by the wind.²⁶

Neither Pilnyak nor the peasants he described imagined what would be done to the peasants and their villages when the NEP was over.

On July 11, 1928, a secret meeting took place between Kamenev, rep­resenting the no longer united opposition, and Bukharin, leader of the "right wing." After collaborating with Stalin closely for several years, Bu­kharin suddenly informed Kamenev: "We consider Stalin's line disastrous for the revolution as a whole. ... Our differences with Stalin are many times more serious than all the differences we had with you." Suddenly Bukharin discovered that Stalin was "an unprincipled intriguer who subordinates everything to the preservation of his own power. He changes his theories depending on whom he wants to get rid of at any particular moment." Kamenev's notes of this conversation with Bukharin fell into the hands of the Trotskyists, who took perverse pleasure in publishing them in early 1929. For Stalin this was one more piece of ammunition in the battle he was undertaking against the right wing. He readily accepted support from the "left" in his struggle against the "right." Many former Left Opposi­tionists, who had been sent into internal exile or confined in special prisons for political opponents ("polit-isolators"), took this occasion to announce their capitulation, their agreement with Stalin's new policy, which they were convinced was actually their policy. According to Ciliga, Preobrazhensky's book on primitive socialist accumulation was reprinted, and Stalin even tried to win Preobrazhensky over. In response to doubts Preobrazhensky expressed, his suspicions that the Central Committee still favored right- wing policies, Stalin assured him: "If necessary, I shall have the entire Central Committee arrested, but I shall carry out the five-year plan."²⁷ The arrest of almost the entire Central Committee did not come about until 1935—1938. For the time being, Stalin merely deported Trotsky to Turkey in February 1929, after having him forcibly removed from Moscow on January 17, 1928, and confining him to Alma-Ata in Central Asia for a year.

Stalin officially announced the end of the NEP in December 1929, but as early as April 1928 he terminated "civil peace" as the prevailing con­dition. "We have internal enemies. We have external enemies. This, com­rades, must not be forgetten for one moment."²⁸ The Shakhty trial was the signal for the war against society to begin. In March 1928 the authorities announced the discovery of a "counterrevolutionary plot." Fifty-three en­gineers, technicians, and directors of the coal industry at the Shakhty mines in the Donbass (Donets basin) were arrested and accused of wrecking and espionage. A sensational six-week trial followed, from May to July, with still more revelations later in the year. This was the first in a series of "wreckers' trials" that went on into 1931. The word wrecker (vreditel) in fact became one of the most widely used terms in Soviet officialese.

The Shakhty trial was the first public show trial since that of the SRs in 1922. The respite of the NEP had intervened. Robert Conquest, author of the most complete history of the Great Terror (aside from Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago), suggests that the Shakhty affair was initiated by Evgeny Evdokimov, the GPU official in charge of the region where Shakhty was located.²⁹ Without discounting the individual initiative of Evdokimov, a former criminal who made a brilliant career in the "organs" during the civil war and who became one of Stalin's boon companions,³⁰ we may conclude that the Shakhty defendants were deliberately selected at a higher level.

Among the accused were three German engineers. In this way the Shakhty trial was designed to accomplish foreign policy aims as well as domestic ones. Moreover, it was a test model for the show trials to come. The defendants were accused of sabotage and spying for the benefit of a foreign power with whom relations at the moment were bad. Some of the defendants signed confessions, which constituted the main evidence against all of them. (Two of the Shakhty defendants never appeared in court, undoubtedly because they refused to sign or died under interrogation. Several disputed the charges presented by the prosecutor, Nikolai Krylenko.) The indignation of the Soviet people was aroused throughout the affair. Twenty years later George Orwell's 1984 described a state in which "two minutes of hatred" were held every day. Citizens would gather in front of television sets; the image of Goldstein, the enemy of the people, would appear on the screen, and everyone would hate him. In the Soviet Union in the 1920s there were no television sets. There were newspapers instead. The first experiment in organized hatred was carried out at Lenin's instigation in the SR trial. During the Shakhty trial, hatred was organized on a significantly broader scale.

An investigation took place in Ekaterinburg in the summer of 1920 into the murder of a group of "specialists," technicians working at the Egor- shinsky mines. The specialists had been killed by "local party comrades," who considered them counterrevolutionaries. Witnesses questioned by the court testified that they knew of no counterrevolutionary actions by the murdered technicians. The murderers were defended by N. V. Kommodov, who argued: "Healthy blood flows in their veins. They have experienced all the burdens of social inequality and have learned to hate their class enemies. It was this feeling that guided their actions."³¹

Eight years later an editorial in Pravda entitled, "A Class Trial," said: 'Today in the Hall of Columns at the House of Trade Unions before the Supreme Court of the USSR there appeared the constellation of 'heroes' of Shakhty. ... They were firmly guaranteed the deadly class hatred of the workers and toiling people of the whole world."³² Kommodov, who acted as attorney for one of the defendants, could find no convincing arguments for his client, in whose veins flowed the "diseased blood" of a specialist. The hate campaign whipped up by the press included a statement by the twelve-year-old son of one defendant, asking that his father be shot.

A new era had begun.

FOREIGN POLICY

The Treaty of Rapallo opened up a period of normal diplomatic relations with the capitalist world; 1924 became the year of the Soviet Republic's "recognition"—by Great Britain in February, followed by Italy, Norway, Austria, Greece, Sweden, China, Denmark, and in October, France. But Soviet foreign policy had two levels: traditional diplomatic relations on one level and, on the other, the activity of the Comintern. After hopes for a revolution in Germany were dashed, the principal task of the Communist parties was to support the foreign policy aims of the Soviet Republic. At the end of 1924, S. Medvedev and A. Shlyapnikov, representatives of the "workers' opposition," wrote in an open letter to the Baku Worker that the entire activity of the Comintern amounted to

artificially creating materially sick Comintern sections and supporting them at the expense of the masses of Russian workers, who had paid for their property with blood and sacrifices but who were unable to use it for them­selves under the present circumstances; in reality, hordes of petit bourgeois servants supported by Russian gold have been created."³³

While it may be true that the Comintern sections lived off of "Russian gold," it is difficult to agree that their only activity was to collect their pay. The Comintern sections actively, though blindly, carried out orders from Moscow. In cases where there was discontent with disobedient leaders, they were immediately replaced by obedient ones. The foreign Communist parties surrounded themselves with a cloud of pro-Communist mass orga­nizations, societies, and clubs that sympathized either secretly or openly with the party and mobilized world public opinion for the defense of the Soviet Union. The German Communist Willy Munzenberg became a master of the new methods of propaganda: he organized and directed the Inter­national Organization for Aid to Revolutionaries, the League of Struggle Against Imperialism, and a pro-Communist (that is to say, pro-Soviet) press group in Germany and conducted worldwide campaigns for the defense of the victims of capitalism (the German anarchist Max Hoelz, the Hungarian Communist Maty as Rakosi, and the American anarchists Sacco and Van- zetti).

Quite often the two levels of foreign policy functioned together and it was difficult to determine where one ended and the other began. Walter Krivitsky, who was head of the Soviet military intelligence network in Western Europe and who in 1937 refused to return to Moscow (where he knew he would be shot), recounts in his memoirs that in 1923, when the French occupied the Ruhr, the Soviet government expected a revolution at any moment. Krivitsky and five other officers were sent to Germany to create within the heart of the Communist party the core of the future German Red Army and the future German Cheka, as well as special detachments of propagandists whose mission it was to undermine morale in the bourgeois army and reserves.³⁴ By autumn 1924, the situation in Germany had sta­bilized itself, but Zinoviev, the chairman of the Comintern, declared that a revolutionary situation had arisen in Estonia. Berzin, head of military intelligence, received an order from Zinoviev to back up the revolution: sixty officers were sent immediately to Estonia. On December 1, 1924, a "revolution" broke out in Revel. The Soviet agents and local Communists received no support at all from the population, and the putsch ended in a bloodbath.³⁵

In the fall of 1927 Stalin (who by this time was directing the Comintern) was offended by the reproaches of the Trotskyists, who accused him of betraying the world revolution; he decided that a revolutionary situation had arisen in China. Stalin sent the German Communist Heinz Neumann and the Soviet Communist Besso Lominadze to Canton. In December 1927 Stalin's agents stirred up a rebellion in Canton that was immediately crushed. In Revel, more than 150 people were shot. In Canton, more than 5,000 were executed.

The lack of separation between traditional diplomatic activity and the innovative moves of the Comintern was indicated by the fact that quite often Soviet diplomatic representatives abroad were at the same time of­ficials of the Comintern. G. S. Agabekov, a top GPU official and a dip­lomatic resident in the Near East, related that "in 1926, the Soviet consul in Meshed (Persia) was also a representative of the Third International, just as in 1924^25 the Soviet plenipotentiary in Afghanistan (Stark) was also the Comintern's secret representative in Afghanistan and the northern provinces of India."³⁶

In the 1920s the Soviet Union concentrated its attention on three coun­tries: Germany, England, and China.

Excellent relations with Germany had developed in the realm of tradi­tional diplomacy; at the same time, the German Communist party gained support, while relations on a third level (economic) continued to develop and strengthen. Economic relations were not limited to trade; they also included the all-around technical aid that Germany accorded to the Soviet Union. More than 2,000 German engineers and technicians arrived in the Soviet Union after the signing of the Rapallo treaty.³⁷ They actively assisted in renewing Soviet industry. German—Soviet military cooperation was pro­vided for in a secret clause of the Rapallo treaty. The Treaty of Versailles prohibited the German army, 100,000 strong, from having modern arma­ments, particularly aircraft and tanks. By the middle of 1923, Junkers was able to build airplanes in Fili, near Moscow. In 1924 a center for training German pilots was opened in Lipetsk. Russian and German chemists ex­perimented together to produce poison gases. Krupp built artillery factories in Soviet Central Asia.³⁸ Reports of German—Soviet military collaboration were published in due course and denied by both Soviets and Germans, but they were fully confirmed by documents found in the German archives after World War II. Again the question arises, which of the two sides won in the process of this cooperation? General von Seeckt was able to rebuild the German army, getting around the Versailles treaty, and he was able to arm it with the latest weaponry, built and tested on Soviet territory. The Red Army certainly profited: military men received training in Germany, industry obtained modern technology. However, since Stalin eventually exterminated all the officers and generals who had been in Germany or had had dealings with German officers, it could be said that only the German side profited.

Robert Conquest suggests, not without reason, that at the time of the Shakhty trial, the inclusion of German engineers among the accused was explained by the fact that in 1927 German technical aid had become predominant and the number of German engineers and technicians had grown too great. It was decided to teach them a lesson. The Shakhty trial implicated three German engineers, but thirty-two others were arrested at the same time. The very number of those arrested indicates the numerical significance of German personnel in the Soviet Union. After the trial, the Soviet government turned to the Americans for technical aid. In mid-1929 the Soviet Union had technical agreements with twenty-seven German firms and fifteen American firms. By the end of 1929, forty American firms were cooperating with the Soviet Union.³⁹

After Great Britain's recognition of the Soviet Union, Anglo—Soviet re­lations were normalized, but Moscow regarded England as its principal adversary, particularly in Asia (Afghanistan and China). In 1924 the Soviet Union tried to take advantage of the fact that for the first time in British history the Labour party won at the polls. It was the newly formed Labour government that recognized the Soviet Union. An attempt was made to turn the British Communist party into a mass organization and to penetrate the trade unions. But in October 1924 the Labour party was defeated. One of the principal causes of this defeat was a document which the English press published as "Zinoviev's Secret Letter." The controversy surrounding the authenticity of this letter, which gave directives to English Communists, is still going on. Even if the letter was a fake, it contains nothing that Zinoviev could not have written. The directive that particularly roused the indignation of English public opinion (to conduct an operation to undermine the army) was one of the twenty-one conditions necessary for all Communist parties for admission to the Comintern. During the general strike in 1926, a collection was taken up in the Soviet Union for use by English strikers. An Anglo—Russian trade union committee was created.

The treaty with China, signed in 1924, provided for the preservation of the Soviet Union's rights to the Chinese Eastern Railway (the part of the main Trans-Siberian rail line, built by the tsarist government in 1903, that passed through Manchuria for a distance of 1,481 kilometers, with a 240- kilometer spur to Harbin) and for the Soviet Union to maintain a protectorate over Outer Mongolia, which had declared itself a people's republic. At the same time, the Soviet Union supplied aid to the Chinese nationalist party, the Kuomintang, led by Sun Yat-sen. Soviet military advisers, directed by Galen-Blyukher, were operating in China. The tiny Chinese Communist party, acting under orders from Moscow, joined the Kuomintang. Soviet policy in China became one of the major themes of the controversy between Stalin and Trotsky. Trotsky insisted on the necessity of stirring up the revolutionary struggle in China, under the leadership of the Communist party; Stalin defended the policy of supporting the Kuomintang and Chiang Kai-shek, who led the party after Sun Yat-sen's death. Stalin and Bukharin believed that the Kuomintang played an "objectively progressive role." Chiang cooperated with Moscow but did not want the Communists in his party. In 1926 the Communists were expelled from the Kuomintang and arrested. In April 1927 Chiang Kai-shek organized a massacre of Com­munists in Shanghai. Soon after, Stalin, hoping to exonerate himself, sent Neumann and Lominadze to Canton. He termed the failure of the Cantonese insurrection a "victorious rear-guard battle."

The Soviet Union's foreign policy for this period was guided by three central precepts: (1) the Soviet Union was the most important factor of world revolution and thus its strengthening, combined with an equivalent strengthening of the world revolutionary movement for the sake of Soviet interests, was the revolutionary task of Communist parties in other coun­tries; (2) conflict between the Soviet Union and the capitalist countries was inevitable, and the revolutionary movement in the capitalist countries was a reserve force that could help Moscow; (3) the nature of capitalist countries was such that subversive revolutionary activity conducted against them did not exclude the possibility of carrying on normal diplomatic and trade relations with them.

The full extent of Western economic and technological aid to the Soviet Union will not be known until the Soviet archives are opened up. The Western firms that collaborated with Moscow have concealed the information almost as carefully as their Soviet partners. Nevertheless, the American historian Anthony Sutton has come to the conclusion, on the basis of German and English archives, that 95 percent of Soviet industrial enterprises re­ceived Western aid in the form of machines, technology, and direct technical aid.⁴⁰

The Soviet Union made skillful use of the competition among capitalist firms. "In the realm of technical assistance," wrote Economicheskaya zhizn (Economic life), "we have neither an English, nor a German, nor an Amer­ican orientation. We maintain a Soviet orientation. ... When we need to modernize our oil, automobile or tractor industries, we turn to the United States because it is the leading country in these industries. When we speak about chemistry, we approach Germany."⁴¹ It was also able to turn for help to Germany, England, and the United States, even though Germany and England recognized the Soviet Union in 1924, while U.S. recognition did not come until 1933. The capitalist firms, who were competing bitterly with each other, rushed to offer their services: they gained concessions, supplied the latest equipment and technology, sent engineers and technicians, and took on Soviet trainees. The myth about a "blockade," "economic isolation," and the hostile attitude of the capitalist "sharks" toward "the socialist homeland" falls apart in the face of the facts. In the 1920s only aid from the West permitted the Soviet authorities to restore the economy rapidly, including transportation, all branches of industry, and the extraction of useful minerals. This aid was given in spite of the Soviet government's policy, which put all sorts of obstacles in the way of the capitalist firms and ended the concessions as soon as Soviet specialists had assimilated Western technology. The capitalist firms were always in a weak position; they had never before encountered a partner as powerful as a government, and they were thirsty for profits. Along with the Comintern and pro-Com­munist organizations, these firms played the role of organizers of public opinion in favor of the Soviet Union. When Standard Oil decided to build an oil refinery in Batum, a top public relations expert was sent to persuade public opinion that a socialist country was a state like any other. Without knowing a word of Russian, this representative of Rockefeller's knew every­thing after several days: The Russians (he always talked about the Russians, not the Soviets) are okay! That's why the United States ought to recognize the Soviet Union and extend credit to it.⁴²

One of the important factors in the development of Soviet—capitalist relations was the activity of certain individual foreigners. First in line is Armand Hammer, son of Dr. Julius Hammer, one of the founders of the American Communist party. Young Armand Hammer arrived in Moscow in 1921 with a recommendation from Martens, the unofficial Soviet trade representative in the United States. He had brought with him a freightcar full of drugs and medicines as a gift to the Soviet government. He met with Lenin, who was drawn to the enterprising young American. Lenin advised him to assume management of the Alapaevsky asbestos mines on a con­cessionary basis, and he personally organized the immediate formation of this concession, which ordinarily would have taken months. Hammer did not limit himself to the first million he earned from the asbestos concession. Until 1930 he lived with several members of his family (his wife, mother, brothers, and uncle) in Moscow. Hundreds of pages, the best of which are by Mikhail Bulgakov, have been written about the housing crisis in Moscow. Hammer rented a twenty-four-room house in Moscow and converted it into the unofficial embassy of the United States. He took out a concession on the production of pencils and pens. In 1926 his factory produced 100 million pencils and made enormous profits, which he used to buy Russian works of art. Unlike all the other concessionaires, Hammer was able to convert his revenues to dollars. His example was infectious. He served as an intermediary in the conclusion of an agreement between the Soviet government and Henry Ford, an ardent enemy of the Communists. The American Consolidated Company (50 percent of the capital was Hammer's; the other 50 percent was the Soviet government's) conducted the affairs of "three dozen American firms" trading with the Soviet Union.⁴³ The phe­nomenal successes of Armand Hammer, who made millions in the Soviet Union, could not fail to entice other capitalists.

The most convincing proof of the nonexistence of "aggressive capitalist plans" was the fact that the Red Army, which in 1929 numbered 1.2 million men, was equipped with prewar Russian and foreign armaments. Soviet industry was still in no condition to produce the necessary weaponry, so it was supplied by the Germans, English, Americans, and French: for ex­ample, heavy machine guns, like the Maxim and Colt; light machine guns, like the Browning and Lewis; artillery on a par with the American 76-inch howitzer; and Renault tanks, built in Fili with the help of the Germans.

The first five-year plan was not implemented until after the contracts on plant construction and technical aid were signed with the Western firms.

Soviet foreign policy successes on the third, economic level, however much they were concealed and disclaimed, did not impede the "pursuit of conflict" on the first two levels. The crisis in Anglo—Soviet relations, brought on by the meddling of Soviet trade unions ("independent from the state") in English affairs during the general strike of 1926, led, after a raid by London police on Soviet trade offices, to a break in diplomatic relations which lasted from 1927 to 1929. Also in 1927, France demanded the recall of Soviet Ambassador Rakovsky, a Trotskyist who had declared in a letter to the Central Committee that in the event of war with the imperialists he would urge the soldiers of the imperialist armies to desert. The French considered such promises incompatible with diplomatic status. Meanwhile, a Russian emigre assassinated the Soviet ambassador to Warsaw, Voikov, who had taken part in the murder of the tsar's family in 1918, and in December the putsch in Canton, conceived by Stalin, ended in defeat.

The Soviet government presented all these separate events as elements in a single plot that was sure to end in an inevitable—and imminent— war: an attack by imperialist forces. This episode in history comes under the heading, "The 1927 War Scare." Historians still debate whether or not the Soviet leaders, primarily Stalin, actually believed in the inevitability of an attack on the Soviet Union. After all, 1927 was the calmest year in the world since the end of World War I. Economic relations with the West were developing. But the "war scare" gave Stalin an additional argument to use in favor of the rapid liquidation of the Opposition, which was un­dermining unity in the face of imperialist intervention. In 1929, Chicherin, who was nominally still deputy commissar of foreign affairs but who in fact had been removed from things for a long time, made a frank disclosure to the American journalist Louis Fischer, whom he met in Wiesbaden while receiving treatment: "In June 1927 I returned from Western Europe. Every­one in Moscow was talking about war. I did my best to dissuade them: 'No one is planning to attack us,' I insisted. Then I was enlightened by a colleague. He told me: 'Hush, we know that. But we need this for the struggle against Trotsky.'"⁴⁴

The Sixth Congress of the Comintern, which gathered in Moscow in July 1928, decided on a new policy line for the second level of Soviet foreign policy. (This turned out to be the Comintern's next-to-last congress. The last would meet in 1934, and in 1943 Stalin would dissolve the Third International by a stroke of the pen.) The sessions of the Sixth Congress were not held in the Kremlin, as before, but in the House of Trade Unions. The Congress stressed the need to strengthen discipline within the Com­munist parties, to subordinate local interests to the interests of the inter­national Communist movement—that is, to Moscow—and to comply unconditionally with all Comintern decisions. According to the old Bol­shevik tradition, the new line provided an opponent: the "rightist" Bu­kharin, who was opposing the extremely left-wing Trotskyist line, then being supported by Stalin. The Communist parties received a directive to regard the socialist parties, labeled "social fascists," as the principal en­emy. Marxist scientific analysis enabled Stalin to conclude that the West had entered a period of world stabilization; therefore the task of the Com­munists was to tear the working class away from the influence of the "social fascists." Then, when the epoch of crises and wars arrived, which was inevitable in view of the growing contradictions among the principal cap­italist countries, particularly between England and the United States, the Communists would be able to try to seize power.

In January 1928 Trotsky and his comrades addressed a letter to the Comintern complaining of the repression they were under. They admitted that repression can play an extremely positive role if it supports a just line and contributes to the liquidation of reactionary groups. The Trotskyists stressed that, as Bolsheviks, they were quite familiar with the use of repres­sion and had repeatedly used repressive measures themselves against the bourgeoisie, the Mensheviks, and so on. They declared that even in the future they had no intention at all of renouncing repression against the enemies of the proletariat. They believed only that the use of repression against them was unjust and that repression against Bolsheviks had always been ineffective. For he who supports a political line that is just will be victorious.

This Trotskyist logic was brilliantly confirmed by Stalin's victory in all his endeavors and Trotsky's defeat. Trotsky must have taken some conso­lation, however, in the fact that Stalin had adopted his line.

THE DAWN OF A NEW CIVILIZATION

In 1928 the "rusty times" came to an end. After the Shakhty trial, which culminated in five executions, things got redder and redder.

During the years of the NEP the worst of the war-inflicted wounds were healed, the economy was restored despite the many difficulties, and life assumed a semblance of normality. But these accomplishments were paid for dearly. The population lived in uncertainty, fearful of breaking the law, afraid of what was to come. Paradoxically, those who were considered the victors (the workers) lived in poverty, although without fear, while those who knew they were the vanquished (the middle peasants, Nepmen, in­tellectuals) enjoyed material comfort, but lived in fear.

Existence under the NEP was measured by various yardsticks. On the one hand, the party knew what the ultimate goal was, but its leaders were locked in bitter internecine warfare over the right to lead the country to that goal by each leader's "only correct path." Meanwhile, on another level, the United States became a universal model and object of adoration. Stalin spoke of combining "American efficiency with Russian revolutionary scope." Aleksei Gastev, a proletarian poet and founder of the League of Time, issued this call: "Let us take the hurricane of revolution, the USSR; add the pulse of America; and we will do the job as steadily as a chronometer." Lev Sosnovsky, a writer for Pravda and a Left Oppositionist, announced a search for "Russian Americans," people who would know "how to work with a rhythm, an ardor, and a doggedness, the likes of which old Russia never knew." The peasant poet Petr Oreshin exclaimed: "And every rural cottage dreams a wondrous dream—a New York of steel." The writer N. Smirnov turned out a popular novel, Jack Vosmerkin the American, about a Russian-American who returned to his homeland to transplant American know-how onto Soviet Russian soil. The peasants of the village where Jack Vosmerkin settled regarded him with hostility, not only because the peasant is a backward type but also because as soon as the peasant begins to apply progressive methods—however admirably American they are—he begins to grow rich. And immediately becomes an enemy of the Soviet government.

Although life seemed to be returning to normal, a mounting antireligious campaign was cause for concern. For example, a peculiar hybrid—the "Red" church service, along with "Red" baptisms and "Red" Easters— was introduced. Non-Christian names were recommended. The civil registry offices hung up lists with such suggestions for girls' names as Atlantide, Brunhilda, Industriya, Octobrina, Februarida, Idea, Kommuna, and May- ina, and for boys, Chervonets, Spartak (Spartacus), Textile, Styag (Banner), and Plamenny Vladilen ("Fiery Vladimir Lenin"). On the back page of Izvestia a certain Demyan Kasyanovich Mironov announced he was changing his name to Dekamiron. In the rural areas, however, most marriages were still held in churches and children's names were chosen from the Christian calendar of saints.

Schools were expected to wither away, along with the family, but a German historian visiting the Soviet Union made this observation: "The Bolsheviks have organized public education in such a way that no one can exceed the limits of the officially authorized level of knowledge and education, so that the proletarian state will not be threatened by a superfluous exchange of information which would transform the citizens into 'subversive ele­ments.'"⁴⁵ The American writer Theodore Dreiser, who spent seventy-seven days in the Soviet Union in 1927, said much the same thing to Bukharin: "You take a child and you drum limited concepts into his head. He does not know anything more than what you teach him, and he will never know anything—you just watch. The success of your revolution, then, depends on the education of the children, does it not? 'In part, yes,' agreed Bu­kharin."⁴⁶

From 1921 to 1928 Soviet literature flourished, but a peculiar kind of writer, unknown before then, appeared on the scene. It seemed that Bu­kharin's idea of standardizing the intellectuals, turning them out "as though from a factory," was being taken literally. Writers became increasingly aware that the traditional calling of Russian literature, the defense of the humble and the abandoned, did not correspond to the new reality. The writers themselves began to plead with the authorities, as Ilya Selvinsky did: "Comrade! ... Do our thinking for us, switch on our nerves, and get us going, just like a factory." Mayakovsky declared a fait accompli: "I feel I'm a Soviet factory." To the population, Stalin was still a chief like any other, much less famous than Trotsky. But having taken the party apparatus in hand long before and having involved himself more and more in the economy and foreign affairs, he began to express his views on literature as well. This took the form at first of personal letters, but these were circulated in all literary, editorial, and censorship circles and were looked upon as directives. For example, Sholokhov, whom a number of "proletar­ian" writers accused of being a plagiarist and a champion of the White Cossacks, was declared by Stalin to be an "illustrious writer of our time."⁴⁷

Revolutionary slogans were still alive, as were hopes for a world revo­lution, the advent of a classless society, and the withering away of the state once all class enemies had been defeated. But the newspapers dealt with more mundane topics as well. They made much of the search for the mysterious Tungus meteorite by the courageous Soviet geologist Leonid

Kulik. Universal attention was paid to the daring Arctic explorations of the Norwegian Amundsen and the Italian Nobile, but of course the Soviet Arctic explorers on the icebreaker Krasin and the Soviet Arctic fliers who saved them from certain death on the polar ice received the most attention of all. These were the first Soviet heroes not connected with war or revolution.

Soviet justice came into being as a form of revolutionary class justice. It was not ashamed of terror, for it was clearing the way for a better future. In a separate room of the Moscow Museum of the Revolution, relics of tsarist "hard labor" were assembled, including instruments of torture and models of the torture chambers. "Prisons have existed and still exist," Bukharin explained, "and a system of coercion exists, but these are directed at new and different goals." "We have merely turned the concept of 'freedom' inside out," he added.⁴⁸ He meant that freedom had been for landowners and capitalists, but now it was for workers and peasants. But according to official data, no less than 40 percent of the Soviet prison population was made up of workers and peasants, and their numbers continued to increase. A simple comparison of the figures shows that ten years after the revolution the number of those in Soviet prisons exceeded the largest number of prisoners at any time in the tsarist era. In 1925, 144,000 persons were serving sentences in Soviet prisons; in 1926, the figure was 149,000; and in 1927, 185,000.⁴⁹ In 1912 the population of the tsarist prisons was 183,864. Then the number dropped steadily, reaching 142,399 in 1916.⁵⁰ The population of Soviet prisons and camps would later grow at rates no one could have imagined.

Lenin's indignant words were to come true:

Scarcely at any time in the past has there been such a degree of overcrowding of prisoners: they have been placed in fortresses and in castles as well as prisons and given special accommodations at police stations. Even private homes and apartments have been temporarily converted into prisons. There is no place to accommodate all those who have been seized, no way of sending the exiles to Siberia in the usual "transports" without organizing special convoy forces.⁵¹

Lenin's indignation over the inhumanity of the tsarist regime was ex­pressed in 1902, when there were 89,889 people in prisons.

After the October revolution prisons were abolished. They became known as houses of detention. Convict labor (katorga) was eliminated until 1943: it was replaced by the "corrective labor camp." Even the word punishment was struck from the law dictionary and replaced by the expression "mea­sures of social defense." And there was no punishment: people who broke revolutionary law were to be annihilated, isolated, or, in the case of "socially friendly" workers and peasants influenced by "survivals of the accursed past," reeducated. Advanced Western methods were used for "reeduca­tion." Political prisoners (members of other socialist parties or Communist oppositionists) enjoyed almost the same rights they had had under the tsars. Marxist legal experts spoke of the impending "withering away" of the law, which would lead to the "liquidation" of the system of coercion, prisons, and so forth.

After 1926 the GPU's prerogatives began to expand. Quite a few hopes were aroused by the disappearance of the Cheka. The GPU, reported one German traveler, "is more refined and elegant than the Cheka. Its agents are extremely courteous, charming, and obliging; they wish to erase the memory of the Cheka."⁵² Foreigners who came to know the "work of the GPU" directly, as clients of that institution, had a different opinion. One of the first foreign accounts of the Solovetsky concentration camps was entitled, as we have noted before, In the Land of the NEP and the Cheka, by the Finnish writer Boris Cederholm.⁵³ Technically, the title was wrong; it should have said GPU not Cheka, but Cederholm saw no difference between them. Neither did the American journalist George Popov, who entitled his memoirs about his time in Lubyanka prison in 1924 simply The Cheka.⁵* The GPU inherited its main residence, the Lubyanka, whose very name inspired horror, from the Cheka: "Shake someone awake at night and say the word 'Lubyanka' and he will stare at his bare feet, say goodbye to everybody, and even if he's young, and healthy as an ox, he'll break down and cry like a baby. '^,55 And of course the GPU inherited Dzerzhinsky, its chairman, from the Cheka.

During the early years of NEP some indecisive attempts were made "to reinforce a very important democratic principle, according to which only judicial bodies should have the right to mete out punishment."⁵⁶ But these attempts ended quickly. In October 1922 the GPU acquired the right to apply "extrajudicial" measures of repression, including execution, to "ban­dits." Its pool of clients quickly widened. On May 6, 1926, for example, the central newspapers reported the GPU's execution of three officials of the Commissariat of Finance "for speculation in gold, foreign currency, and government bonds."

From the Cheka the GPU inherited its own places of detention, including Solovki, the prison camp on the Solovetsky Islands. Until the appearance of Hitler's camps, the Solovki served as a symbol of arbitrariness, cruelty, and tyrannical power. "Here, we don't have Soviet power; we have Solo­vetsky power." That was how the head of the camp greeted the prisoners. "Solovetsky power" was the power of the GPU, but after all, that was the quintessence of Soviet power.

From 1927 on, the GPU took a more and more active part in the struggle unfolding within the party, although it had been involved since 1923. To commemorate the tenth anniversary of the "organs" in December 1927, Pravda saluted their successes and declared that the GPU was vital in the struggle against the class enemy and in maintaining law and order.⁵⁷ Throughout 1927, the GPU's prerogatives continued to expand. After the assassination of Voikov in July, the GPU was "obliged" to take decisive measures in order to defend the country against foreign spies, provocateurs, and assassins, as well as from their monarchist allies and the White Guard.⁵⁸ After an explosion at a party club in Leningrad (perhaps a provocation), the GPU announced the execution of ten former monarchists, who were charged with espionage. The repression broadened and intensified. The humanitarian penitentiary system was denounced as a manifestation of bourgeois humanism, an anti-Marxist deviation.

In 1928 Bukharin, who already knew what Stalin was, declared: "We are creating and will create a civilization in comparison with which capitalist civilization will seem like a vulgar street dance compared with the heroic symphonies of Beethoven."⁵⁹ In fact, a new civilization was being born. Its unusual nature was understood by one of the rare foreigners who visited the Soviet Union in 1927, Alfred Fabre-Luce, who declared that it existed only "in the future, that is, in the realm of the impossible." "I feel like some hero of Einstein's relativity concept," he wrote in his conclusion, "who returns to his native planet, gray-haired after a ten-minute voyage."⁶⁰

Osip Mandelstam defined the dawning civilization less poetically and more precisely: "They think," he said to his wife regarding the people of Moscow, busily going about their affairs, "they think that everything is normal just because the streetcars are running."

CHAPTER

THE

GREAT RUPTURE, 1929-1934

FIVE IN FOUR

The dream of a planned economy along the lines of Germany's war economy had preoccupied Lenin as early as 1918. In 1920 the first long-term plan was drawn up by GOELRO, the State Commission for the Electrification of Russia. This plan initially provided for the construction of one hundred power plants. Lenin proclaimed electrification as the key to communism. But in January 1921, Zinoviev spoke of no more than twenty-seven power plants. In the end, the GOELRO plan remained on paper.

In 1927 Soviet economists began drafting the first five-year plan—a comprehensive plan providing for the development of every region, using every resource for the industrialization of the country. It was supposed to go into effect in October 1928, but was not even submitted for approval until the Sixteenth Party Conference in April 1929.

Just as an experienced boxer prepares his opponent for a knockout by "softening him up" with blows to the liver, stomach, kidneys, and heart, Stalin softened up the country before hitting it with the Great Change. The softening up of the party was brought to completion with the elimination of the "right wing." In February 1929, at a joint session of the Politburo and the Central Control Commission, Bukharin was censured for his "un­principled behavior" in conducting talks with Kamenev. Rykov, chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, and Tomsky, leader of the trade unions, were also censured. In April 1929 the Central Committee removed Bukharin from his posts as editor of Pravda and president of the Comintern and Tomsky from his post as chairman of the Ail-Union Central Council of Trade Unions. Bukharin's supporter Uglanov lost his positions as sec­retary of the Moscow Committee, secretary of the Central Committee, and candidate member of the Politburo. In November 1929, Bukharin was expelled from the Politburo. "Right deviation" had become a crime.

In April 1929 the Sixteenth Party Conference passed a resolution calling for a second general purge (the first was in 1921): anyone who at any time (from 1921 to 1929) had voted against Stalin or supported an opposition platform—no matter which one—was purged. The conference decided to extend the purge to include nonparty officials working in Soviet institutions. All Soviet functionaries were subject to the purge—or, one might say, passed through purgatory. Broad strata of "worker activists" were enlisted to help in checking over the biographies, service records, conduct, and loyalty of these functionaries. Special "light cavalry" units were set up, consisting of Komsomol members, while trade union officials and shock- workers acted as judges. Thus the party involved broad sections of the population in repressive activity.

Instructions from the Commissariat of Workers' and Peasants' Inspection divided all those "purged" from the Soviet apparatus into three categories. Those in the "first category" were deprived of their rights to all benefits, pensions, and jobs and were evicted from their apartments. Those in the "second category" were allowed to find work in government organizations other than the kind presently employing them or in another district. Those in the "third category" were demoted, and the demotion was placed on their record. The grounds for purging someone under one category or another were so broad (including "corrupt elements who have perverted Soviet laws or linked up with the kulaks and Nepmen... embezzlers, bribe takers, saboteurs, wreckers, and parasites")¹ and so ambiguous that the entire population was intimidated, especially considering the hundreds of thou­sands of watchful eyes of the "people's purifiers." Besides, the Shakhty trial was still fresh in people's memories.

One of the results of the new policy was the flight of highly placed officials from the Soviet Union and the refusal of some Soviet diplomatic, commercial, and intelligence personnel abroad, where the purge was also conducted, to return to their country. Early in 1928 Boris Bazhanov, who had worked as one of Stalin's assistants since 1923, fled to Persia. Aga- bekov, head of the Eastern sector of the OGPU's foreign department, im­mediately received the order to kill Bazhanov. While the assassination was being planned, "a telegram arrived from Moscow canceling the 'liquidation' order. ... It turned out that Bazhanov, in his work in Moscow, had not been privy to any important secrets."² Several months later Agabekov himself fled. Soviet diplomats Bessedovsky, Barmin, Dmitrievsky, and many others stayed in the West.

An important part of the "softening up" process was the new offensive against the church. On April 8, 1929, a law was passed that strengthened the state's control over the parishes. On May 22 an amendment was made to article 13 of the Soviet constitution, which until then had provided for freedom of religion and of antireligious propaganda. Propagation of religion now became a crime against the state. Priests and their families were deprived of civil rights. As "disenfranchised persons" they did not have the right to ration cards, medical aid, or communal apartments. The chil­dren of priests were not allowed to attend schools or higher educational institutions. Thus they were forced to renounce their fathers in order to obtain an education or simply to live.

Hundreds of churches were destroyed, including many that were his­torical monuments. The churches that survived had their bells removed, ostensibly so that their ringing "would not disturb the workers." On August 27 a "continuous work week" was introduced; the seven-day week was abolished and replaced by a new system—four days of work followed by one day of rest. "Utopia has become a reality," exclaimed one enraptured writer. 'The continuous-production week has knocked our time out of its calendar saddle. With the elimination of that sleepy interval, the seventh day, Sunday, the country has entered a state of permanent waking."³ In­dustry was not really ready for the continuous work week, but the system did have the advantage of eliminating Sunday. The "continuous week" lasted until 1940, when the Soviet government, of its own good will, granted the workers Sunday as a day of rest.

Among the factors that helped create the particular atmosphere of the five-year-plan era and helped forge the new Soviet consciousness, a special place belongs to the "control figures."

The drafting of a detailed five-year plan to transform the economy "re­quired much more information about interindustry links than could be available in the existing state of information and statistics."⁴ Nevertheless, the plan was drafted in two versions, an initial variant and an optimal variant. Even the initial version was very optimistic. "Miracles seldom occur in economic life," writes one English historian, "and in the absence of divine intervention it is hard to imagine how one would expect simul­taneous increases of investment and consumption, not to speak of the output of industry, agriculture, and labor productivity, by such trememdous per­centages."⁵ But scarcely had the optimal figures been adopted than Stalin raised them to a new, unprecedented level. In 1926 Stalin had ridiculed Trotsky's "fantastic" projects, his desire for "super-industrialization," his idea of building a giant electric power plant on the Dnepr. The Dneprostroi project, observed the general secretary at one time, would require enormous resources, several hundred million rubles. This would be, said Stalin, using his own brand of humor, like "the peasant who after saving a few kopeks, instead of repairing his plow, went out and bought a Gramophone."⁶ By early 1930 Trotsky's figures seemed "shabby" to Stalin. Mensheviks, right- wing Communists, and nonparty members were thrown out of the statistical, economic, and scientific research institutes as "wreckers." Those who replaced them furnished the new figures required of them—and they were astronomical.

The optimal plan provided for coal production to double, from 35 million tons in 1927—28 to 75 million tons in 1932. Stalin's figure was 105 million tons. The corresponding figures for oil were 11.7 million, 21.7 million, and 55 million tons; for iron, 3.2 million, 10 million and 16 million tons. Similar leaps were made in all the control figures for the five-year plan.⁷ But this was still not enough. In December 1929, a gathering of "shockworkers" (udarniki) called for the fulfillment of the five-year plan in four years. "Five in Four" became the slogan of the day. But this, too, was not enough. Stalin announced that "tempos decide everything." On February 4, 1931, he mentioned the possibility—hence the necessity—of fulfilling the plan in the decisive sectors of industry in three years.

The figures intoxicated not only the formulators of the plans but also those who carried them out, the citizens of the country. It seemed that one more effort, one more factory built, one more dam constructed—and hap­piness would be there, right around the corner. With one more step they would "catch up with and surpass" the capitalist countries. Mayakovsky added his urgings: "Forward, time!" Stalin warned: "If in ten years we do not cover the distance that other countries took fifty or a hundred years to traverse, we will be crushed." In a popular play of the early 1930s, Fear by Aleksandr Afinogenov, the old professor Borodin, reactionary but re­educated by the GPU, asserts that "the general motivation for the behavior of 80 percent of all those I have investigated [Soviet citizens—M. H.] is fear." The other 20 percent, explains the professor, are the workers, newly risen to a position of responsibility. 'They have nothing to fear; they are the country's masters." But, adds the learned expert, "their mind is afraid for them... the mind of the manual laborer fears excessive strain and develops a persecution complex. They strive constantly to catch up and surpass. And gasping for breath in this endless race, the mind loses its sanity and slowly becomes degraded."

The figures ceased to mean anything; they became a mere symbol of the desire to race forward. Like a balloon they carried the country away into a nonexistent world.

But the country could not ignore reality. An army of workers and tech­nicians was thrown into fulfilling the senseless plans. It seemed that the ideas of Trotsky and Bukharin on the militarization of labor, rejected in the early 1920s, were being revived. The only quota that was met far ahead of time was the employment index. The expectation was that the state economy would employ 14.7 million, but by 1932 22.9 million were em­ployed. The shortage of qualified workers was compensated for with quan­tity. Just as masses of soldiers are thrown into battle when firepower is lacking, millions of former peasants, undisciplined, ignorant of the tools and machinery, were mobilized to carry out the five-year plan.

The rapid growth of the urban population led to a catastrophic worsening of the housing situation. Food supplies in the cities were severely strained. Strumilin, future academician and one of the authors of Stalin's version of the five-year plan, wrote in Essays on Soviet Economics in 1927 that the rate of accumulation, "given our long experience of consumer asceticism, could exceed all known records." All records for "consumer asceticism" were indeed surpassed during those years in the villages, which literally starved to death. But even in the cities the situation was extremely critical. In April 1929 bread was rationed. By the end of the year, rationing was extended to all foodstuffs, then to manufactured goods. In 1931 additional "coupons" were issued, for it was impossible to obtain one's allotment even with ration cards.

The real situation for workers in this period can be seen from the reports by GPU agents that survived in the Smolensk archives. In 1929 (and the situation only worsened after that) a worker received 600 grams of bread a day, plus 300 grams for each member of his family; between 200 grams and 1 liter of vegetable oil a month; 1 kilogram of sugar a month; and for clothing, 30-36 meters of cotton a year.⁸ A significant number of workers ate in the factory canteens. A novel by Fedor Gladkov described one such canteen at the Dneprostroi dam project: "I go to the factory kitchen and am sickened by the very sight of the vile poison being made there. I go to the work sites, where the food is delivered in thermoses. The bluish swill stinks like a corpse and a cesspool. The workers prefer plain bread and water."⁹ One GPU agent reported the complaints of the workers who ate in Canteen No. 7: "In the so-called soup it is hard to find pieces of anything.

It is not soup, but vegetable water; there is no fat, and the meat is not always washed sufficiently. ... [In some cases] little worms were found in the lunch."¹⁰

In the summer of 1931 Stalin declared war on "egalitarianism." Equality was said to be a petit bourgeois notion. A pejorative term was used for it: uravnilovka, "leveling." Inequality officially became a socialist virtue. A new system of wage scales was introduced, with payment depending on output (piece rate) as well as on one's job category. The workers were to be stimulated from then on by material incentives. Certain nonmaterial incentives, awards and honorific titles, were also introduced, but material benefits always came with them. Their recipients obtained promotions, special rations, and so on. There were at least six different prices for the same merchandise: (1) government prices for goods purchased with ration cards; (2) "commercial" prices, significantly higher, for goods purchased without ration cards; (3) "moderately increased prices" for goods sold ex­clusively in working-class districts (these were lower than "commercial" but higher than government prices); (4) prices in "model stores," general stores where prices were higher than "commercial" prices; (5) prices at the torgsin, a store where goods were sold only in exchange for gold or foreign currency; and (6) market prices.

Prices never stopped climbing, wages rose only nominally, and produc­tion quotas constantly increased. To accelerate the pace of the work, the "shockworkers' movement" and the system of "socialist emulation" were utilized.

This period saw the rise of special stores and special dining halls for the various categories of leaders. And hierarchical precedence was strictly respected. The wife of a member of the Politburo of the German Communist party, who was in Moscow in 1931, recalls how, one fine day, a section of the dining room of the Hotel Luxe, reserved for the Comintern, was marked off. It was thenceforth set aside for the highest-ranking officials only, and the food they were served was better than that given to second- or third- class Comintern officials.¹¹

GPU agents in Smolensk reported the reaction of the workers to these new perquisites for officialdom.¹² Similarly, Ante Ciliga related what an old Leningrad worker told him: "We live worse now than at the time of the capitalists. If we had had to face such starvation, if our salaries had been so low in the days of our old masters, we would have gone on strike a thousand times."¹³ In fact, the workers did go on strike: there are GPU reports to this effect in the Smolensk archives. But it was very difficult to strike, for many reasons: workers were fired, which resulted in the loss of ration cards, eviction from factory housing, even arrest; the trade unions "worked together as one" with management;¹⁴ and the official propaganda never stopped assuring the workers that Soviet power was their power, that if only they went one step further, the happy days of communism would begin. Besides, the wreckers were responsible for all the difficulties.

In April 1929, when work on the first five-year plan was just starting, Stalin was already preparing his scapegoats. Wreckers like those in the Shakhty trial, he declared, "are sitting now in all the branches of our industry."¹⁵ Wrecking and sabotage, he said, had occurred and will continue to occur.¹⁶ Arrests and trials confirmed the general secretary's words. The first five-year plan period was also a time of major show trials. In August 1930 a number of bacteriologists "under the leadership" of Professor Ka- ratygin were arrested and tried in closed session for allegedly bringing on an epidemic among horses. The Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore, then traveling around the Soviet Union, chose that moment to comment ap­provingly, in numerous interviews, on everything he had seen in the land of the victorious proletariat.

In September 1930 it was announced that forty-eight figures prominent in the food industry, headed by a Professor Ryazanov, had been shot for creating difficulties in the food supply system.

In November—December 1930 the second full-scale show trial after Shakhty was organized in Moscow, the trial of the so-called Industrial party. The indictment alleged that the clandestine Industrial party had no fewer than 2,000 members. Eight of them were placed on trial. The Shakhty trial had proven that too large a number of defendants detracted from the spec­tacle. That experience was taken into account. The accused were charged with wrecking activities carried out on orders from French President Ray­mond Ротсагё, Lawrence of Arabia, and the Dutch oil magnate Henri Deterding. Except for those arrested, there were no witnesses and no ma­terial evidence at all. They all confessed their guilt, especially Professor Ramzin, the "head" of the party. Ramzin had been a Bolshevik in 1905— 1907, but had left the party and devoted himself to a career in engineering. After the revolution he had loyally cooperated with the Soviet authorities. Suddenly he was the head of an anti-Soviet "clandestine organization." The defendants confessed to everything: to being in league with the capitalist emig^ Ryabushinsky, who gave them their instructions, and to having planned to install a former tsarist minister, Vyshegradsky, as minister of finance after the overthrow of Soviet power. In the course of the trial it came out that both Ryabushinsky and Vyshegradsky were dead, but that did not affect the outcome of the trial. Five of the accused were sentenced to be shot, but were pardoned. Ramzin was released very quickly.¹⁷ The

use of provocateurs was necessary in all the trials staged by the GPU

(4 ??

organs.

Repression continued after the Industrial party trial. Preparations began for a trial of the so-called Toiling Peasants' party. Judging by the massive arrests of agrarian economists, agronomists, other agricultural specialists, and cooperative members, the "organs" intended to fabricate an under­ground organization with tens of thousands of members. This was logical. In a peasant country a "peasant party" had to be proportionately larger than an Industrial party. The "organs" selected Professor Kondratiev as the leader of the Toiling Peasants' party. Professor Chayanov's fantastic novel, My Brother Alekseis Journey to the Land of Peasant Utopia (published in 1920 under the pseudonym Ivan Kremnev), which predicted that in 1984 (Chayanov was the first to choose this date, long before Orwell) Russia would be a free peasant country, was designated as the organization's secret program. Yaroslavsky, writing in Pravda, made a point for the benefit of the investigator in the case: "Now, after the exposure of this clandestine organization of bourgeois restorationists, this kulak manifesto takes on a special significance."¹⁸ The newspapers pointed to a direct link between the "kulak conspirators" and the party's right wing: "All the sympathies of the Kondratievites were on the side of the rights in their struggle against the party leadership. The rights were smashed. And now, thanks to the vigilance of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the leaders of the Kondra­tievites have been placed on GPU rations."¹⁹ For reasons unknown, the trial of the Toiling Peasants' party never took place. Those arrested, in­cluding Kondratiev and Chayanov, perished in prisons or in camps.

In March 1931, a trial of Mensheviks was held in Moscow. The majority of the accused worked in the planning agencies; they were accused of wrecking activities "in the planning sphere"—of raising or lowering figures so as to prevent fulfillment of the plans. This trial is of particular interest to historians because one of the defendants, Mikhail Yakubovich, who spent twenty-two years in prisons and camps, survived. In 1967, in a letter addressed to the prosecutor general of the USSR, Yakubovich described how the trial was rigged.

Massive arrests and some trials of "wreckers" continued. The arrests were not limited to the "technical" intelligentsia—engineers, technicians, planners, and managers—but included even rank-and-file workers. 'The class enemy," said one article on the reasons behind the poor functioning of the rail system, "the White Guards and the kulaks, still have the potential to infiltrate the railways by taking 'modest' and inconspicuous jobs as 'oilers.'"²⁰ Oilers, switchmen, and yardmen, not to mention engineers and firemen, went off to prison and the camps, along with milling machine operators, metalworkers, and others blamed for breakdowns in production and failure to fulfill unfulfillable plans. They swelled the ranks of the monstrously enlarged army of prisoners, which occupied a more and more important place in the program for building communism. A significant number of the major objectives of the first five-year plan were brought to completion with the help of prison labor. The Baltic—White Sea canal was built entirely by prisoners. Approximately 500,000 prisoners²¹ over a period of twenty months cut their way through the Karelian granite, by manual labor, without machinery, to build a canal that proved unnecessary.²²

But the race continued, and in Stalin's words: 'The party whipped the country on, rushing it forward at full speed."²³

In 1932 the summing up began. By juggling figures (making calculations with percentages, in rubles whose value was fixed at will by the planning organs, and using 1913 as the base year for comparisons), it was possible to claim that the "main indices" of the plan had been fulfilled. Where it was not fulfilled, wreckers were to blame. Of course, some indices could be checked. The plan had called for an increase of 15—20 percent in the buying power of the ruble. But the reality of inflation was obvious to all Soviet citizens. The plan promised the "elimination of the shortage of manufactured goods by the end of the planning period," an increase of 69 percent in real wages, and "for a number of the most important consumer goods, a doubling of the norms of consumption."²⁴ The waiting lines for goods bought with ration cards, including bread, were hours long and left no doubt that these promises had not been kept. Nevertheless, in an un­usually short time gigantic industrial projects were completed in the Urals, the Kuznetsk basin, the Volga region, and the Ukraine. Factories were built in Moscow and Leningrad, textile mills in Central Asia, and so on. The Turkestan—Siberia Railway, built before the revolution, was extended and a branch added to Karaganda. In all, 5,500 kilometers of rail were laid. (The plan called for 16,000.)

A great deal was accomplished. Stalin had a right to ask at the Seven­teenth Party Congress in 1934: "Is this not a miracle?"²⁵ But it was not. The plan was realized primarily through "domestic accumulation," which was obtained thanks to the "consumer asceticism" Strumilin had written about—that is, the ruthless exploitation of the population. The country was exporting raw materials, including foodstuffs—grain, meat, sugar— for which there was a severe need at home. At the same time, the importing of vitally needed goods, such as wool, cotton, rice, and leather, was stopped. Timber was exported at dumping prices: "We must cut down not only the amount of timber that grows in a year, but much more; in essence, our task is not to utilize the forests, but to obliterate them."²⁶ Production was expanding, in oil and gold, which were also exported, the increased amounts of gold and timber obtained largely through prisoner labor. Even certain treasures from Russian museums were sold, and gold was extorted from the citizenry by every possible means. According to Walter Krivitsky, Stalin decided to revive the customs of the good old days by resorting to the simplest means of acquiring foreign currency: manufacturing dollars in the cellars of the GPU. In 1908 Stalin had directed the "expropriations" from the state treasury at Tiflis; a quarter of a century later he gave the order to begin manufacturing $100 bills in Moscow, in the Lubyanka.²⁷

The five-year plan could not have been implemented without foreign assistance. In 1928 a group of Soviet engineers arrived in Detroit and requested that Albert Kahn and Company, an eminent firm of industrial architects in the United States, design plans for industrial buildings worth $2 billion.²⁸ Close to a dozen designs were to be made in Detroit, the rest in the Soviet Union. According to an agreement with the Supreme Economic Council of the USSR, the American firm agreed to design all aspects of Soviet industry, heavy and light. Foreign designers, technicians, engineers, and skilled workers built the industrial units of the first five-year plan. Primarily they were Americans, who pushed the Germans out of first place after 1928; after them came the Germans, British, Italians, and French. The dam on the Dnepr was built by the firm of Colonel Hugh Cooper, a prominent American hydraulic engineer; the majority of the largest Soviet power plants were equipped by the British firm Metropolitan-Vickers; West­ern companies designed, built, and equipped Magnitogorsk and Kuznetsk, the Urals Machinery Works, the Kaganovich Ball Bearing Plant in Moscow, an automobile plant in Nizhny Novgorod, and a truck plant in Yaroslavl, among others. Ordzhonikidze, the commissar of heavy industry, was able to state with full justification: "Our factories, our mines, our mills are now equipped with excellent technology that cannot be found in any one country. ... How did we get it? We bought the most highly perfected machinery, the very latest technology in the world, from the Americans, Germans, French, and English, and with that we equipped our enterprises." And he added caustically, "Meanwhile, many of their factories and mines still have machinery dating from the nineteenth century, or the early part of the twentieth."²⁹

Lest the foreign participants in socialist construction begin to feel too independent, or Soviet citizens forget who the enemy was, a few foreigners were arrested from time to time. In April 1933 one more "wreckers" trial was staged, featuring five British engineers from Metropolitan-Vickers among the eighteen defendants. The fact that the British firm, which had been equipping Soviet power plants since 1923, was virtually in a monopoly position was undoubtedly a factor behind these indictments. In spite of many hours of interrogation, the Britishers refused to plead guilty and got off with light sentences. Thornton, the leader of the group, was sentenced to three years, Cushny to two, two were deported, and the other acquitted. The Soviet citizens in the case received sentences ranging from eighteen months to ten years.

It is impossible to sum up the results of the first five-year plan strictly in terms of industrial successes (or failures). From 1928 to 1932 significant strides were made in the industrialization of the country. But the main arena of the "Great Rupture," or the "great backbreaking," as Solzhenitsyn called it, was agriculture. The main object of this all-out offensive—and its main victim—was the peasantry, that is, the overwhelming majority of the population.

FULL STEAM AHEAD—INTO THE SWAMP

Stalin's article "A Year of Great Change" appeared in Pravda on November 7, 1928. It spoke of "the radical change that has taken place in the development of our agriculture from small, backward individual farming to large-scale advanced collective agriculture."³⁰ The article ended: "We are advancing full steam ahead along the path of industrialization." This might have seemed just a metaphor, but within seven weeks it became reality.

Stalin announced the start of a new revolution on December 27, 1929, at a conference of "Marxist students of the agrarian question." The Soviet Union had just celebrated Stalin's fiftieth birthday, December 21. The country discovered for the first time that Stalin had been its Great Leader (Veliky Vozhd) all along, organizer of the October revolution, creator of the Red Army, victorious commander against the Whites and foreign invaders, guardian of Lenin's "general line" and vanquisher of all its opponents, leader of the world proletariat, and great strategist of the five-year plan. Portraits of the Leader were printed in unbelievable numbers, his bust appeared in all prominent places, and a pamphlet containing "birthday materials" about him was circulated everywhere. The most enthusiastic article, which set forth the main lines for the future cult of Stalin, was written by Karl Radek. Since 1921 the National Socialists in Germany had been on a campaign to build up a cult around Hitler. By 1929 they had accumulated considerable experience. This was the model Radek drew on for his trend-setting article. Stalin responded to all the homage paid him on his birthday by pledging to shed "all of his blood, to the last drop if necessary," for the cause, and he gave the credit for all his accomplishments to "the great party of the working class, which nurtured me and reared me in its image."³¹ Using a figure of speech from the as yet unforgotten Bible, Stalin described his origins with astonishing accuracy. The party had made Stalin what he was, but as sometimes happens, the child turned against its parent, killed it, and in turn sired a new offspring, a party fashioned in Stalin's image.

On December 27 the Leader announced the end of NEP and the start of a new era. The problem was as follows, he declared: "Either we go backward to capitalism or forward to socialism."³² In exact conformity with Bolshevik tradition, the problem was presented so as to allow only one response. It was necessary to go on the offensive. "What does this mean?" Stalin asked, and answered himself: "It means that after a policy that consisted in limiting the exploitative tendencies of the kulaks, we have switched to a policy of eliminating the kulaks as a class."³³ The path forward was the path of "complete collectivization." To those who questioned whether dekulakization was necessary for complete collectivization, Stalin replied: "The question is absurd!" A great lover of Russian proverbs, he added, "When the head is cut off, why cry over a few hairs?"³⁴

The next sixty-five days shook the country more than the ten days in October 1917 that "shook the world." Those nine weeks convulsed the lives of the Soviet Union's more than 130 million peasants, transformed the country's economy, and changed the very nature of the state.

Two processes went on simultaneously: the creation of collective farms (kolkhozes), and the liquidation of the kulaks. Above all, dekulakization was necessary to provide the "material base" for the collective farms. From the end of 1929 to the middle of 1930,

more than 320,000 kulak faramers were dekulakized. Their property (worth more than 175 million rubles) was transferred to the indivisible funds of the kolkhozes and used for the entrance fees of poor peasants and unpropertied farmhands. Former kulak property amounted to more than 34 percent of the total value of the indivisible funds of all the kolkhozes taken together.³⁵

The liquidation of the kulaks deprived the countryside of the most en­terprising and independent-minded peasants and broke the spirit of resis­tance. Moreover, the fate of "dekulakized persons," deportation to Siberia or the north of Russia, served as an example for anyone who thought of not joining the kolkhoz. It was necessary to join immediately. A commission of the Politburo formed on December 8, 1929, under the direction of Yakov Yakovlev, commissar of agriculture, proposed that "complete collectiviza­tion" be carried out in the lower Volga region by autumn 1930, the central Black Earth region and the Ukrainian steppes by autumn 1931, the left bank of the Ukraine by spring 1932, and the north and Siberia by 1933.

Stalin and his "close comrade-in-arms" Molotov insisted that the pace be even faster. On December 10 the Kolkhoztsentr, the central office es­tablished to administer all kolkhozes, sent a directive by telegraph to local organizations in the regions slated for complete collectivization: "Implement 100 percent collectivization of draft animals and cattle, 80 percent of hogs, and 60 percent of sheep and poultry.ⁿ³⁶ Joining the kolkhoz meant surren­dering your property, all of it, to the collective.

Party members (25,000 of them) were sent to the villages to force the peasants to join kolkhozes. It was announced that whoever did not join would be considered an enemy of the Soviet state. On July 1, 1928, only 1.7 percent of the peasantry belonged to kolkhozes; by November 1929 the figure had risen to 7.6 percent; in March 1930 it was 58 percent.

There had not been a final decision on the exact form the kolkhoz should take, whether all land, implements, and animals should be collectivized or some left in individual hands. There was still a lack of personnel capable of administering collective farms. The necessary tractors and other ma­chinery were not available. Lenin, who never stopped hoping for miracles, once said: "If tomorrow we could supply 100,000 first-class tractors—you know very well that at present this is sheer fantasy—the middle peasant would say, ⁴I am for the kommuniycC (i.e., for communism)."³⁷ Stalin fully shared Lenin's steadfast faith in the direct and inseparable connection between the material base and the spiritual superstructure (100,000 tractors equals "I am for communism"), but he acknowledged that he did not have the tractors. He promised 60,000 by the spring of 1930 and the magical 100,000 for the following year. In 1928, according to official Soviet figures, there were only 26,700 tractors.

Unfazed by such problems, Stalin simply cracked the whip harder at the local party officials, who in turn drove the rank-and-file activists (the "twenty-five-thousanders") harder. The number of collective farmers stead­ily increased, and the number of kulaks dwindled. The term kulak had never been defined. Anyone who employed hired labor was considered a kulak, but so was anyone who owned two horses or two cows or a nice house. Since there was no clear notion of what a kulak was, overall quotas for dekulakization and collectivization were assigned for each region. The quota for collectivization was the same everywhere, 100 percent. The de­kulakization quota varied, averaging 5—7 percent.

Many of the peasants who had previously been regarded as middle or pros­perous peasants were now listed as kulaks and made subject to dekulaki- zation. In addition, many less prosperous middle peasants and even some poor peasants were deported, after being labeled—to make repression against them easier—with the absurd term kulak henchmen (podkulachniki). ... In some regions 15—20 percent of the peasants were deported; for every kulak deported three or four middle or poor peasants were arrested.³⁸

That is how a History of the USSR published in Moscow thirty years after the events described the situation in the countryside in 1930. In a fit of inexplicable frankness it admitted that the concept "kulak henchman" was absurd. Yet the leadership had used that term to justify the harshest mea­sures against the peasantry.

On the basis of resolutions passed by the Central Committee of the party, the government's Central Executive Committee, and the Council of People's Commissars on January 3 and February 1, 1930, as well as special in­structions dated February 4, all kulaks and podkulachniki were divided into three categories.

Organizers and perpetrators of terrorist acts, and those engaged in active anti-Soviet work, were isolated and sent to concentration camps. Kulaks who demonstrated the slightest active resistance were deported to remote regions of the country, where they were put to work cutting down the forests, doing farm labor, etc. The other kulaks remained where they were, but they could not have any land allotments from within the bounds of the kolkhozes.³⁹

Moreover, "during the autumn and winter of 1930-31 additional depor­tations were carried out affecting the expropriated kulak households."⁴⁰

Kulaks and their "henchmen" were deported with all of their families, including infants and old people. Hundreds of thousands were shipped in unheated boxcars thousands of kilometers away to remote parts of the Urals, Siberia, and Kazakhstan. Many died en route; many others died after their arrival, for as a rule they were deported to uninhabitable locations in the forests, mountains, or steppes. In 1937 Walter Krivitsky recalled what he had seen by chance at a railroad station in Kursk in the winter of 1934: "I will never forget what I saw. In the waiting area there were nearly six hundred peasants—men, women, and children—being driven from one camp to another like cattle. ... Many were lying down, almost naked, on the cold floor. Others were obviously dying of typhoid fever. Hunger, tor­ment, and despair were written on every face."⁴¹ A quarter of a century later, during the brief period of the Thaw, a number of Soviet writers confirmed what the "defector" Krivitsky had written.

The full story of this first socialist genocide has yet to be written. Chron­ologically, the first genocide of the twentieth century was that of the Ar­menians by the Turks. The massacre of Don Cossacks by the Bolsheviks during the civil war likewise approached genocidal proportions. The Turks destroyed a population of a different faith and nationality; the Cossacks suffered during a fratricidal civil war. The genocide against the peasants in the Soviet Union was unique not only for its monstrous scale; it was directed against an indigenous population by a government of the same nationality, and in time of peace.

In 1945, after the defeat of Nazi Germany and the public disclosure of all its crimes, jurists, sociologists, psychologists, historians, and journalists began the inevitable controversy over whether the German people had known about the Nazi crimes or not. There is no question that the Soviet city people knew about the massacre in the countryside. In fact, no one tried to conceal it. Stalin spoke openly about the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class," and all his lieutenants echoed him. At the railroad stations, city dwellers could see the thousands of women and children who had fled from the villages and were dying of hunger. Kulaks, "dekulakized persons," and "kulak henchmen" died alike. They were not considered human. So­ciety spat them out, just as the "disenfranchised persons" and "has-beens" were after October 1917, just as the Jews were in Nazi Germany.

The great proletarian humanist Maxim Gorky invented a formula to justify this genocide: "If the enemy does not surrender, he must be destroyed." Gorky's article containing this formula was printed simultaneously in Pravda and Izvestia on November 15, 1930, then publicized in speeches and lectures, in newspapers and magazines, and over the radio. "We are opposed by everything that has outlived the time set for it by history, and this gives us the right to consider ourselves again in a state of civil war. The conclusion naturally follows that if the enemy does not surrender, he must be de­stroyed."⁴²

Official sources note forty-five instances of hostile action against col­lectivization in Central Asia in early March 1930, involving 17,400 persons, and "rebellions and disturbances in other regions."⁴³ This is a ridiculous understatement of the peasantry's resistance to the kolkhoz: collectivization provoked hostility among the peasants in the Ukraine, Siberia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Kuban, and the Don region. The detailed docu­mentary evidence presumably resides in the KGB archives. Scattered bits of testimony allow us nevertheless to deduce the breadth of the resistance. In the Northern Caucasus and in a number of regions in the Ukraine regular units of the Red Army, backed by air power, were thrown against the peasantry. Frinovsky, commander of the frontier forces of the NKVD, who directed the suppression of the peasant rebellions, reported to a meeting of the Politburo that the rivers of the Northern Caucasus were carrying thousands of corpses to the sea. In some areas Red Army men refused to fire on the peasants and were shot immediately; in other cases small units went over to the rebels.

Once war was declared on the peasantry, the Soviet propaganda machine indignandy denounced cases of resistance, especially the murder of "twenty- five thousanders," the activists assigned to driving the peasants into the kolkhozes.

Passive resistance became the universal form of resistance. The peasants refused to join kolkhozes as long as they had sufficient strength not to yield to threats and force, and they destroyed their livestock as a sign of protest. Livestock transferred to the kolkhoz died from lack of shelter, fodder, and care.

The statistics demonstrate the disaster that struck the Soviet livestock herd. In 1928 there were 33.5 million horses in the country; in 1932, 19.6 million. For cattle the figures were, respectively, 70.5 million and 40.7 million; for pigs, 26 million and 11.6 million; for sheep and goats, 146 million and 52.1 million.⁴⁴ In Kazakhstan the number of sheep and goats fell from 19.2 million in 1930 to only 2.6 million in 1935.⁴⁵ From 1929 to 1934 a total of 149.4 million head of livestock were destroyed. The value of these animals and their products (milk, butter, wool, etc.) far exceeded the value of the giant factories built during the same period. The destruction of horses meant a loss of 8.8 million horsepower. In 1935, when there were already 379,500 tractors, the available horsepower was still 2.2 million less than in 1928, when there were only 26,700 tractors.

Passive resistance was suppressed just as fiercely as the active variety. In Voronezh in the summer of 1930 a show trial was held featuring sixteen leaders of the "Fedorovite" religious sect. This movement, headed by a peasant named Fedorov, had arisen in the early years of the NEP in what had been Voronezh Province. The main tenet of their faith was "nonre- sistance to evil," and they sought by every means possible to "avoid evil temptation" or "participation in evil deeds." During the NEP the Fedo- rovites, and other sects such as the Dukhobors, Molokane, and Baptists, were spared persecution by the Soviet authorities, who hoped to use them against the Orthodox church. When the Fedorovites refused to join the kolkhozes, however, they were immediately branded enemies, conspirators, and kulaks. Fifteen of their leaders were sentenced to death (and imme­diately shot). The sixteenth was condemned to lifelong confinement in a psychiatric hospital. Nearly 2,000 Fedorovites were deported to the taiga and tundra, to meet a slow but certain death. For three months the regions infected with the idea of nonresistance to evil were "combed out." The peasants, praying and appealing to their tormentors, offered no resistance to arrest.

The peasants' passive resistance, the destruction of livestock, the com­plete disorganization of work in the kolkhozes, and the general ruin caused by continued dekulakization and deportations all led in 1932—33 to a famine that surpassed even the famine of 1921—22 in its geographical extent and the number of its victims. On this occasion, however, the government took no measures against the famine and in fact contributed to tis spread, using it as a weapon in the civil war against the peasantry.

The difference between the two famines was not limited just to the larger scale of that brought on by collectivization. Another difference was that the government denied the existence of the later one. Even to mention it was a crime against the state. In 1921 the Soviet government, however reluctantly, had allowed independent figures to seek help from abroad. In the 1930s nothing was said about the famine, and grain continued to be exported throughout this period. In 1928 grain exports amounted to only 1 million centners; in 1929, 13 million; in 1930, 48.3 million; in 1931, 51.8 million; and in 1932, 18.1 million.

When Terekhov, a secretary of the Ukrainian party's Central Committee, asked at a Moscow conference that grain be sent to save the starving collective farmers of the Kharkov region, Stalin cut him off: "I see that you are a good storyteller. You have invented this tale about a famine, hoping to frighten us, but it won't work!"⁴⁶ It was impossible to frighten Stalin with "tales" of a famine. If he did not want to save the people dying of hunger, it was not because grain was lacking (the export of grain was evidence to the contrary) but because the famine and the havoc it wreaked vitiated the peasantry as a political force and broke the last vestiges of its resistance.

"For Stalin the peasants were scum," Khrushchev recalled much later in his memoirs. "He had no respect for the peasants or their work. He thought the only way to get farmers to produce was to put pressure on them. Under Stalin, state procurements were forcibly requisitioned for the coun­tryside to feed the cities."⁴⁷

In the cities the workers were not starving; they merely lived from hand to mouth. The leaders, however, denied themselves nothing. Dmitrievsky, the former Soviet diplomat, described how he had been fed at a sanatorium for "higher-ups" in the Crimea: 'The usual menu abounded in tasty dishes, with everything in which Russia is rich. Breakfast at eight, with eggs, ham, cheese, cocoa, tea, and milk. At eleven, yogurt. Then a four-course midday meal: soup, fish, meat, dessert, and fruit. During the afternoon, tea and pastries. In the evening, a two-course supper."⁴⁸ Walter Krivitsky, who vacationed in similar conditions during the famine, at the former estate of the Baryatinsky princes near Kursk, recounted the self-justifications of the luxuriating Soviet elite: "We are traveling a difficult road to socialism. Many have fallen along the way. We must eat well and relax after our labors, enjoying for a few weeks of the year the comforts that are still not accessible to others, for it is we who are building the happy life of the future."⁴⁹

The completion of the first five-year plan gave Stalin the opportunity to play benefactor, announcing the great achievements and benefits to the people. Since the very first days of the revolution the party had deceived the workers and poor peasants, in whose name it ruled, by promising them that paradise on earth was imminent. In the late 1920s the deception, both conscious and unconscious, became a lie. During the first five-year plan it became the Great Lie. The Great Terror was preceded by—and is in­variably accompanied by—the Great Lie. As a British humorist once said, there are three kinds of lies: a lie, a barefaced lie, and statistics. He was unaware of a fourth kind, Stalinist statistics, and a fifth, the Stalinist lie.

In summing up the achievements of the First Five-Year Plan, Stalin was not ashamed to announce that workers' wages had risen by 67 percent and that the material conditions of the workers and peasants had improved from year to year. In a popular Moscow anecdote of the period a tourist guide at a zoo points to a crocodile recently brought to the capital and explains that from tail to head it is five meters long but from head to tail it is six. "How could that be?" asks a tourist. "You don't believe it? Measure it yourself," the guide answers. "You'll see." Stalin had roughly the same answer for anyone who wanted to check his figures. Only "sworn enemies of the Soviet system" could have any doubts about the improvement of the workers' and peasants' conditions in the Soviet Union, he declared.⁵⁰

Fifteen years after the revolution Pravda proclaimed, "For a Communist there is no task more noble than the improvement of the workers' condi­tions."⁵¹ In the fall of 1932, when those words were written, famine and collectivization were at their height. Seventeen years after the revolution Stalin declared: 'There would have been no use in overthrowing capitalism in November 1917 and building socialism all these years if we were not going to secure a life of plenty for our people. Socialism does not mean destitution and privation."⁵²

For all of Stalin's lies, however, collectivization never went smoothly. In late February 1930 it became obvious even to Stalin that the mad dash to collectivize everything, which he himself had ordered at the end of 1929, threatened to end in disaster. Discontent began to penetrate the army, which was composed of the sons of peasants. So Stalin took a step backward, as though intending to retreat. On March 2, 1930, Pravda published his

article, "Dizzy with Success," in which he placed all the blame on those who were following orders, the local party activists. The peasants who had been driven into the kolkhozes read this as the abandonment of collectiv­ization. After all, had he not written, "Who benefits by these distortions, this bureaucratic decreeing of a collective farm movement, these unseemly threats against the peasants? Nobody but our enemies!" After the publi­cation of this article the kolkhozes collapsed like a house of cards. In the central Black Earth region, where 82 percent of the individual farms had been collectivized by March, only 18 percent remained collectivized in May. To the peasants Stalin had become the good and just ruler supreme. All the trouble had been caused by local misrulers.

A step backward had been taken, however, only to prepare the way for ten new steps forward. By September 1931 nearly 60 percent of the farms had been collectivized again; in 1934, 75 percent. Repression against the peasants did not end with the establishment of the kolkhoz system. The aim of collectivization was to "solve the grain problem." The kolkhozes were formed for the convenience of the state, but the appropriate methods for controlling the kolkhozes were not found immediately.

First, a system of obligatory deliveries to the state was introduced (and meeting these obligations became "the first commandment of the collective farmer"). The kolkhozes were obliged to surrender between 25 and 33 percent of their products at fixed prices established by the state. Second, the kolkhozes were stripped of all agricultural machinery, that is, of the very tractors that were supposed to make the peasants say, "I am for communism." The kolkhozes had the land and the labor force, but the machinery was held by state-run machine and tractor stations (MTSs) es­tablished by a decree of June 5, 1929. In return for its services the MTS took another 20 percent of the harvest, and it was impossible to conceal the harvest from the MTS personnel, since they actually worked the kolkhoz fields. Thus, control was established over kolkhoz production. In addition, "political departments" attached to the MTSs were introduced in January 1933, with the task of monitoring the collective farmers from the political point of view. The head of each political department was flanked by a GPU representative, who could instantly turn word into deed by arresting errant peasants. In January 1933 Stalin spoke ironically about those who believed that after the liquidation of the kulaks there would be no more enemies. He pointed out that storehouse personnel, accountants, and managers could be enemies, too. Immediately 34.4 percent of all employees at storage facilities were arrested and charged with sabotage; the same with 25 percent of all bookkeepers, and so forth.⁵³

Among the more eloquent documents of the period is a secret letter of

May 8, 1933, to all party and government workers and all organs of the GPU, the courts, and the procuracy. This letter, marked "secret, not for publication," was found in the Smolensk archives. It provides a good summary of what happened during collectivization, especially the forms and methods used to carry it out. The letter, signed by Molotov as president of the Sovnarkom and Stalin as general secretary of the party's Central Committee, consisted of two parts: "Regularization of Arrest Procedures"; and "Reduction of Overloading [i.e., an excessive number of prisoners] at Places of Confinement." The instructions under the first part were "to prevent arrests by persons not authorized by law—chairmen of district soviet executive committees, district and regional plenipotentiaries, chair­men of village soviets, chairmen of kolkhozes and associations of kolkhozes, secretaries of party cells, etc." The "etc." was particularly significant. It meant that until then virtually anyone had been able to arrest peasants. The letter put an end to this situation, except for "the Far Eastern Territory, Central Asia, and Kazakhstan," where the continuation of these practices was authorized for another six months.

The second part of the letter showed the results of such mass arrests and indiscriminate power to arrest. The letter stipulated that no more than 400,000 people should be held in places of confinement—other than labor camps and penal colonies. As of May 8, twice that number were being held, because the letter instructed the GPU, the commissariats of justice of the Soviet republics, and the procuracy of the USSR to "undertake immediately to relieve the overloading at places of detention and within a two-month period reduce the number of prisoners from 800,000 to 400,000.

If the overloading of the prisons was relieved, that did not mean that the prisoners were freed, but only that they were dispatched to the camps more quickly. Room was made in the prisons, and the work force in the camps was swelled. The Western journalist William Henry Chamberlin, who was a correspondent in Moscow in the 1930s, had the following to report about the camps: "I was informed by a reliable source that in the concentration camps in Siberia alone there were close to 300,000 prisoners. The number of Soviet citizens who were deprived of their liberty without the slightest hint of a trial during the years of the five-year plan must be estimated at no less than 2 million."⁵⁵ The official figure of 800,000 in the prisons alone as of May 8, 1933, suggests that the total number must have been far more than 2 million.

The economic results of collectivization were deplorable. During the first four years of the five-year plan the total harvest of grain diminished, ac­cording to official calculations, from 733.3 million centners in 1928 to 696.7 million in 1931—1932. The yield per hectare in 1932 was 5.7 cent­ners. In 1913 it had been 8.2 centners.⁵⁶ In 1928 the total output for agriculture was 124 percent of the amount in 1913. In 1929 this dropped to 121 percent; in 1930, 117 percent; in 1932, 107 percent; and in 1933, 101 percent. Livestock production in 1933 was only 65 percent of pro­duction in 1913.⁵⁷ Yet in summing up the results of collectivization on January 7, 1933, Stalin was satisfied: 'The party has succeeded in creating conditions which enable it to obtain 1,200—1,400 million poods [394—460 million centners] of marketable grain annually, instead of 500—600 million poods [164—197 million centners], as was the case when individual peasant farming predominated."⁵⁸

This success was paid for primarily with millions of human lives. The demographic results of collectivization were tragic. The number of victims has never been, and will never be, determined exactly. (The losses of livestock were calculated, on the other hand, down to the last sheep.) Population figures and the data on the birth rate and mortality rate were no longer published after 1932. Stalin took personal charge of statistics. In January 1934, at the Seventeenth Party Congress, the "Congress of Victors," he reported "an increase in the population of the Soviet Union from 160,500,000 at the end of 1930 to 168,000,000 at the end of 1933." Ten years later he would tell Churchill that "the poor peasants" had taken reprisals against "10 million kulaks," of whom the "vast majority" were annihilated, the rest being sent to Siberia.⁵⁹ In 1935 Molotov reported that in 1928 the kulaks and well-to-do peasants had numbered 5,618,000, but as of January 1, 1935, only 149,000 were left.⁶⁰ Aleksandr Orlov reports that foreign journalists, including those who praised Stalin's policies, es­timated the number of victims of the famine at 5—7 million. The GPU gave Stalin an estimate of 3.3—3.5 million.⁶¹ The Soviet demographer Boris Urlanis notes a population loss of 7.5 million between the end of 1932 and the end of 1933.⁶²

After considering all the estimates and accounts, Robert Conquest arrived at the cautious figure of "over 5 million deaths from hunger and the diseases of hunger."⁶³ In a samizdat essay written in the period 1976—1978, I. G. Dyadkin estimated the population loss from 1929 to 1936 at 15.2 million.⁶⁴ The authorities expressed their opinion of Dyadkin's figures by arresting him.

The monstrous dimensions of this bloodletting become more apparent if we recall the angry indictment Bakunin hurled at the tsarist autocracy: "In the course of some 200 years the tsarist system had destroyed more than a million victims as a result of its brutish contempt for human rights and human life."⁶⁵ Bakunin included in his total for the "tsarist system" victims of war, epidemics, and other natural disasters that occurred in the course of those 200 years. A comparison of the number of victims in these two periods, 200 years of tsarist rule and a few years of Stalinist collectivization, shows the difference between autocracy and totalitarianism, between an unhurried historical existence and an insane rush toward "progress."

With amazing insight, as early as 1919, Ivan Bunin uncovered "the Bolsheviks' diabolical secret." They wanted to kill human sensibility. "Peo­ple live by a certain measure," Bunin wrote in his diary,

Even imagination and sensibility are measured. And so you go beyond this limit. As with the price of bread or beef. "What? Three rubles a pound!" (That is still within your frame of reference.) But if the price is raised to a thousand rubles, there will be no more shouts or amazement, only numbed insensibility. "What's that, seven?" "No, my dear, seven hundred." Then you really feel stunned, paralyzed. Because if seven people are hanged, you can still imagine it, but try to imagine seven hundred, or even seventy.⁶⁶

Bunin still measured sensibility by nineteenth-century standards. It never occurred to him, of course, that the number of people hanged, shot, tortured to death, and so on would be measured, not in the hundreds, but in the millions.

One of the most important aspects of collectivization was its sociological shock effect. The post-October tremor did not touch the deeper strata of society, but the shock of collectivization reached the very foundations of rural society. It destroyed the old peasantry and in its place produced a new social type—the collective farmer, a being who very quickly lost all interest in working the land. In the latter half of the 1920s such writers as Konstantin Fedin, Vsevolod Ivanov, and Leonid Leonov had written about postrevolutionary rural Russia. The revolution had not affected it at all, they said; it continued to live in the sixteenth century or at best the seventeenth. They portrayed Russia as a kind of antediluvian beast, a brontosaurus with a huge, inert body (the countryside) and a tiny brain (the city). Collectivization killed the brontosaurus.

The best works about collectivization were left to us by Andrei Platonov: The Foundation Pit (Kotlovan), which was never printed in the Soviet Union; and the short novel Vprok (meaning "pointless, for no good reason"), whose very title aroused immediate and angry criticism from Stalin. In these works Platonov in effect was asking, Does the country really need this insane attempt to reach socialism on paper? The entire subsequent history of the Soviet Union demonstrates that collectivization left the economy with a gaping wound that has never healed.

In Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak very accurately described the con­sequences of collectivization. Through terror people were broken of the habit of thinking; an illusory world was created for them, which they were required to accept as real. Pasternak was wrong, though, when he said the authorities could not admit that collectivization had been a mistake. For Stalin collectivization was not a mistake but a great victory.

Politically, collectivization was a brilliant success. From Stalin's point of view it was absolutely necessary. S. Dmitrievsky, the Soviet diplomat who defected while in Stockholm in 1930, published a biography of Stalin in 1931 that may be considered the first apologia for the Leader to appear in the West and the first statement of certain ideas that the Leader could not express openly at home.

The edifice of Stalin's dictatorship can be maintained and his plans carried out only if political and economic power is fully monopolized by Stalin. Political power has been in his hands for a long time. But up until now he had not had full economic power. That is possible only on the basis of a monopolistic state capitalism encompassing the country's entire economic life without exception.⁶⁷

Dmitrievsky noted a threat to Stalin's dictatorship from the peasant quarter. 'The victory of the peasantry within the country would be a victory for the West, for its fundamental conception of individualism and liberalism in political life."⁶⁸

Dmitrievsky wrote his biography of Stalin just when collectivization was in full swing. When that campaign was over, the entire economic life of the country was indeed in Stalin's hands. The entire citizenry became completely dependent on the state, both politically and economically. Si­multaneously, monopoly control was exerted over another part of people's lives, the spiritual aspect.

THE INEXORABLE RISE OF JOSEPH STALIN

This is how Dmitrievsky described a Politburo meeting in 1930: "Rudzutak, steady and impassive, usually chairs the meeting. But the central, the decisive presence, despite his customary silence, even because of it, is Stalin. All eyes are on him. Many at the meeting dislike him, some even hate him, but for the moment he is nothing less than the autocrat of the Russian state."⁶⁹

The American journalist Louis Fischer concluded his account of the Sixteenth Party Congress, held in June—July 1930, with these words:

A good comrade should advise Stalin to stop the orgy of glorification of his person. ... Every day hundreds and thousands of telegrams full of compli­ments in exalted, exaggerated Oriental style—"You are the very greatest Leader," "the most faithful disciple of Lenin," etc.—are addressed to him. Three cities are named after him, along with countless villages, collective farms, schools, factories, and institutions. ... Though Stalin may not be responsible for this state of affairs, he tolerates it. He could put an end to it just by pressing a button.⁷⁰

Fischer later learned that when this passage was translated for Stalin, the Leader's response was brief and to the point: "Scum!"

Robert C. Tucker, the American biographer of Stalin, argues that the real cult, the deification, of Stalin began at the end of 1931 with an article in which the general secretary presented himself as the only legitimate interpreter of Marx. It is true that in 1929—1930 Stalin had not yet assumed all the attributes of the Supreme Leader and Teacher, whose every word became law for all of progressive mankind. Nevertheless, by then he not only possessed vast power but had already become the object of a cult, as Louis Fischer described. In those first years of the five-year plan he was not universally worshiped, as he soon would be. Evidence of reluctance to make a god of him could be seen in two attempts to challenge his authority in the early 1930s. They were made, not by veteran oppositionists, but by Bolsheviks of the younger generation.

In November 1930 a plot was uncovered, the "Syrtsov plot" as Dmitriev- sky called it, or the "right-ultraleft bloc" in the official terminology, which considered the combination of such mutually exclusive concepts perfectly acceptable. A few months earlier Sergei Syrtsov had begun a meteoric rise, becoming chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR in 1929 and an alternate member of the Politburo after the Sixteenth Party Congress, in July 1930. His fall was every bit as sudden as his rise. Dmitrievsky, who gives the fullest account of the "plot," says that Syrtsov, a favorite of Stalin's, along with a number of other "high party and gov­ernment officials, came to the conclusion that the most decisive measures had to be taken to change the policies of the government to which they themselves belonged. "⁷¹ Dmitrievsky stresses that Syrtsov, in all his articles and speeches, "remained what he was, a devoted adherent to the Stalinist system of ideas." What he was dissatisfied with was the administrative mess, the incredible bureaucracy of the machine of state. His "purely practical, nonideological platform"⁷² was endorsed by Besso Lominadze, who at one time had been sent by Stalin to attempt a revolution in Canton, and by Lazar Shatskin, a leader of the Komsomol. What is more, Dmi- trievsky states, "there were rumors that Stalin himself was somehow mixed up in this plot, hoping to use it to carry through a number of radical changes."⁷³ Knowing Stalin, we cannot reject even such fantastic rumors. Would he really have refrained from playing the provocateur if that suited his ends? The "conspirators" were arrested and removed from their posts, but only mild sanctions were taken against them. It was the last time that criticism of the party line was viewed simply as a political matter, rather than "treason" or "terrorism."

The summer of 1932 saw the second challenge to Stalin's authority in this period. Mikhail Ryutin, a former Bukharin supporter and one-time secretary of the party's Moscow committee, circulated a 160-page program containing three main demands: (1) economic retreat (a slower pace of industrialization and an end to forced collectivization); (2) democracy within the party; and (3) removal of Stalin. An entire chapter of the program dealt with Stalin, whom Ryutin called "the evil genius of the party and the revolution," "the gravedigger of the revolution," and a "provocateur."⁷⁴

Charges were brought not only against Ryutin but also against Uglanov, formerly first secretary of the Moscow committee, and against Tolmachev and Eismont, formerly people's commissars and Central Committee mem­bers. All were accused of trying to form a "counterrevolutionary bourgeois- kulak organization" whose purpose was to "restore capitalism in the USSR." Ryutin had once been an editor of the military newspaper Red Star. Now he was charged with attempting to organize a terrorist group among student officers at the Military School of the Ail-Union Central Executive Com­mittee, with the aim of assassinating Stalin. For the first time party members were accused of plotting terrorist acts when all they had done was express oppositional views. For the first time Stalin demanded the death penalty for the "plotters." However, the Politburo refused to authorize the execution of Ryutin. According to Krivitsky, Kirov opposed the death penalty in this case and rallied the majority of the Politburo behind him.⁷⁵ Stalin would recall the Ryutin platform with a vengeance four years later, and within a year and a half he made Kirov pay for his conduct.

Ryutin circulated his program at the height of the famine, in the midst of collectivization and the mad rush to complete "five in four." Meanwhile the Left Opposition, i.e., Trotsky, supported Stalin.

The Trotskyists welcomed the decision to collectivize agriculture, al­though Trotsky did reproach Stalin for his theoretical illiteracy, for not even considering the second volume of Capital in his policy of collectivization.⁷⁶ (Trotsky wrote this in his Bulletin of the Opposition, which he began to publish after being expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929.) Sometimes it is possible to find in Trotsky's Bulletin letters from the Soviet Union crit­icizing collectivization for not being radical enough. "In place of the dis­possessed and deported kulaks," a certain A. T. complains in a letter dated June 12, 1930, "in the soil fertilized by centrist illusions, we see the sprouting of new capitalist shoots."⁷⁷ In a 1931 pamphlet, Problems of the Development of the USSR, Trotsky called collectivization "a new epoch in the development of humanity, the beginning of the liquidation of the 'idiocy of rural life.'" Ante Ciliga, who in 1930 was in Stalin's prisons and camps, told of the unenviable position of the imprisoned Trotskyists when they received instructions from their leader to defend the view that the Soviet Union was a "workers' state." It is true that Trotsky wrote, 'The Soviet Union has not entered into socialism, as the ruling Stalinist faction teaches." Instead, Trotsky argued, it had entered "only into the first stage of devel­opment in the direction of socialism." In a letter to his son in October 1932 he wrote that it would be wrong to raise the slogan "Down with Stalin" as a war cry at that moment because "at present Milyukov, the Mensheviks, and Thermidorians of all sorts... will willingly echo the cry. ... It may happen within a few months," this great strategist of the revolution con­tinued, "that Stalin may have to defend himself against Thermidorian pres­sure, and that we temporarily may have to support him."⁷⁸ With enemies like these, Stalin didn't need friends.

The years of the First Five-Year Plan were the years of Stalin's inexorable rise. He concentrated all power, material and spiritual, in his hands. He was praised and glorified without restraint. A single word from him could stop or start the entire country. He would utter brief slogans and entire policies would change: 'Technology decides everything," 'Tempos decide everything," "Cadres decide everything." He devastated the countryside and killed millions of peasants, then blamed his subordinates. He imposed a regime of virtual slavery on the workers, then declared: "Of all the greatest treasures in the world, human beings, cadres, are the most precious and the most decisive." He announced that "life has become more joyous," and the country, bathed in blood and tears, was compelled to rejoice.

Hundreds of books have been written about Stalin in an attempt to penetrate the mystery of his success, the cult that surrounded him, his seemingly inexorable rise to greater and greater heights and unlimited power. He himself revealed the secret of his success in a simple formula: "If you are backward, if you are weak, that means you are wrong and can be beaten and enslaved. If you are mighty, that means you are right, and people have to beware of you. "⁷⁹ Stalin was referring to the might and power of the state, to the idea that might makes right in both foreign and domestic policy, but his formula also applied to the individual in a political power struggle.

For decades Trotsky's views decisively influenced most biographers of Stalin, "the irreplaceable general secretary," as Souvarine called him. Stalin was portrayed as a mediocrity, "a gray blur," borrowing the expression first used by Sukhanov. He was a liar, a scoundrel, and a good-for-nothing who had accidentally usurped the position that rightfully belonged to Trotsky, the brilliant organizer, writer, theoretician, and practical leader. After Sta­lin's death many biographers seemed inclined to depict him as a devil who had been plotting virtually since childhood to seize total power. The per­sonality traits of the mature Stalin, whose monstrous power unbalanced his mind, were projected back to an earlier period onto the Stalin who was fighting for power and who won because he understood the true nature of the Bolshevik party better than his opponents and who best understood the weaknesses of his rivals.

We can safely assume that his plans for the kind of state and society he wanted did not crystalize in his mind until the late 1920s, when his victory over his rivals, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Bukharin, was no longer in doubt. We can obtain a fairly clear picture of Stalin's plans, ideas, and aspirations from Dmitrievsky's books, although most biographers of Stalin disregard him completely.

Dmitrievsky was unquestionably a follower of Ustryalov, and he carried the changing landmarks ideology a step further, portraying Stalin as the embodiment of Russian national communism. Dmitrievsky's book on Stalin (1931) and his Soviet Portraits (1932) were aimed at winning the emigr6 community over to Stalin's side. What he wrote then seemed strange and unbelievable, but today it deserves special attention, because Stalin soon embarked on the road Dmitrievsky predicted.

A certain process had been underway in Russia, Dmitrievsky argued: "People who with full sincerity considered themselves at first to be nothing but Communists have now become National Communists, and many of them are already standing on the threshold of pure Russian nationalism."⁸⁰ The future of Russia was to be a national, or people's, empire, and the general secretary was the man leading the country to that state. "Could it be that only a thick-headed battering ram like Stalin can break through the door to Russia's future?" Dmitrievsky asked rhetorically.⁸¹ To him, Stalin's dic­tatorship was in many respects already a national, people's dictatorship. At any rate, it was "far more closely linked with the masses than any so- called democracy."⁸² The strength of the Stalinist system lay "not only in its bayonets" but in these links with the nation.⁸³

Stalin's program consisted of several points, according to Dmitrievsky. First, to follow a "policy of applying maximum pressure, both in the party and the state apparatus, until everything and everyone is about to burst." Then would come the time when the idea of a "Red, proletarian, Russo- Asiatic imperialism" could be put into effect. The world had been divided into two camps—imperialism and its opponents. At the head of those fed up with imperialism and willing to fight to the death against it would stand the Soviet Union, That was how Stalin summed up his views, according to Dmitrievsky.⁸⁴ But the struggle against imperialism meant a struggle against the West. "It is necessary to catch up with and surpass the hated West, to bring it down, to break its arrogant power. For the sake of this objective, he is ready to sacrifice not only the small nation to which he was born but every generation now alive."⁸⁵

This enemy of democracy and of the West, this implacable despot "who has no doubts about anything, who feels no pity for anyone," was building a national, people's empire. Russia was "gradually and ever more thor­oughly ridding itself of the buzzing fly of Marxism, and advancing farther and farther along the road to a national system. Stalin's victory was the first step on this road, because it broke the back of the main force fighting Marxism in this country."⁸⁶

In 1932, when Dmitrievsky wrote those lines, Trotsky still believed that Stalin was a Marxist, insufficiently grounded in theory and inclined to violate the letter and the spirit of the doctrine, but a Marxist nevertheless. To Dmitrievsky Stalin was already a fighter against Marxism. Both observers were right, each in a certain sense. Stalin was a Marxist as long as he found it helpful and an anti-Marxist whenever its dogmas became a con­straint upon him. This was also true of nationalism, which also contained too much dogma for Stalin. He would regard Russia as the motherland only so long as the power in Russia was "ours, the workers' power, Stalinist power," as Dmitrievsky rightly observed.⁸⁷

Nationalism, Marxism, whatever—anything was used as building ma­terial to consolidate the power Stalin had inherited from Lenin. Dmitrievsky saw Stalin as the predecessor of a future Russian Caesar, the builder of a future nationalist-led Russia. In fact, Stalin was a Caesar serving his own ends and building his own, purely Stalinist state.

Stalin's triumph was celebrated at the Seventeenth Party Congress in January 1934. This was his apotheosis. The achievements of industriali­zation were visible, collectivization had been completed, the spiritual life of Soviet society had been firmly taken in hand, and new laws had been passed that chained the citizenry down in all possible ways. In five years the country had changed beyond recognition. No one would dare any longer to challenge Stalin's autocratic rule.

Kirov, who had less than a year to live, called it the Congress of Victors. In September 1934, Hitler told his National Socialists, gathered at Nurem- burg, that they were the real congress of victors.

In his speech to the Seventeenth Party Congress Stalin promised peace and tranquility:

At the Fifteenth Congress it was still necessary to prove that the party line was correct and to wage a struggle against certain anti-Leninist groups; and at the Sixteenth Party Congress we had to deal the final blow to the last adherents of these groups. At this congress, however, there is nothing more to prove and, it seems, no one to fight. Everyone now sees that the line of the party has triumphed.⁸⁸

The stenographic record at this point records "thunderous applause." Of the applauding delegates, who numbered 1,966, only 59 were to take part in the next congress, the Eighteenth, in 1939. Nearly two-thirds of the delegates to the Congress of Victors were arrested in the intervening five years. Of those, only a very few survived.

The first official biography of Stalin was published in 1935 in a great many languages. Stalin had always hoped Gorky would write it, but the father of proletarian literature never got around to it, and "the social de­mand" had to be met by Henri Barbusse. It was rumored that the biography was actually written by Alfred Kurella, a German Communist writer, and that Barbusse merely put his name to it. Be that as it may, Barbusse's book, Stalin: A New World Seen Through One Man, was soon banned in the Soviet Union, for nearly all the Leader's friends and comrades-in-arms mentioned in the book had become enemies of the people. Nevertheless this "biography" provided the promoters of Stalin's cult with a splendid model to follow. Consider this paean to Stalin, for example: "Although you do not know him, he knows you and is thinking of you. Whoever you may be, you have need of this benefactor. Whoever you may be, the finest part of your destiny is in the hands of that other man, who also watches you, and who works for you."⁸⁹

Of course there was also Dmitrievsky's portrait:

Calm, immovable, Stalin sits there, with the stony face of an antediluvian lizard, in which only the eyes are alive. All thoughts, desires, plans converge upon him. He listens, reads, considers, thinking intently. Confidently, with­out any haste, he issues his orders. He weaves his web of intrigue. Elevates his own people and crushes the others. Buys and sells bodies and souls.⁹⁰

Barbusse is more flattering about the Benefactor's outer appearance. He is a "man with a scholar's mind, a workman's face, and the dress of a simple soldier."⁹¹

The ultimate assessment was given by Kirov at the Seventeenth Congress. He called Stalin "the greatest man of all ages and nations." Stalin had reached the heights of power. The next stage would begin with Kirov's murder.

ALL QUIET ON EVERY FRONT

Tranquility on the Soviet Union's borders was an essential condition for the success of Stalin's "revolution from above." Soviet diplomacy—the "ground floor" of Soviet foreign policy—sought to ensure such tranquility during the First Five-Year Plan.

Only one incident seriously disrupted the calm, but it gave the Red Army the opportunity to show itself in battle for the first time since the civil war. There had been no diplomatic relations between China and Moscow since 1928. In the summer of 1929, Chiang Kai-shek's government provoked the Soviet Union: the consulate staffs in Manchuria and northern China were arrested. (The consulates in Harbin and Mukden had continued to function despite the break in diplomatic relations.) The civilian em­ployees of the Soviet-owned Chinese Eastern Railway were also arrested. Then the railroad was seized. When China refused to release the Soviet citizens and return the railroad, Soviet forces intervened and defeated the Chinese army after several battles. The Special Red Army of the Far East was commanded by Vasily Blyukher, who in 1924—1927 had been a military adviser to the Kuomintang. In December 1929 the status quo was restored on the Soviet—Chinese border. Chiang Kai-shek had miscalculated, under­estimating the strength and determination of the Soviet government. Al­though the Stalin regime feared serious international complications, it would try to use to its own advantage any situation that arose.

At the end of the 1920s, Moscow intervened in a civil war in Afghanistan in support of King Amanullah, who was threatened by a major rebellion. Agabekov, in his account of this episode, stated that the decision was made to support Amanullah because he based himself on the southern Afghan tribes, the "natural enemies" of the British, rather than Bacho Sakao, who based himself on the population of northern Afghanistan and therefore might try to "extend his influence into Soviet Turkestan." A "strike force" under the command of Primakov, former Soviet military аПасЬё in Kabul and a hero of the civil war, was sent to Afghanistan to support Amanullah. After a series of successful engagements with Bacho Sakao's troops, the Soviet military unit was recalled, for Amanullah had given up the struggle against the insurgents.⁹²

Relations with Germany were at the center of Soviet foreign policy in­terests during the First Five-Year Plan. Only at the end of this period was a longstanding aim of Soviet diplomacy achieved, that is, the signing of nonaggression pacts with France (in 1931) and, over Germany's objections, with Poland (in 1932). In 1926 and 1931, Germany and the Soviet Union renewed and amplified the terms of the Treaty of Rapallo. The privileged relations between the two countries, as opponents of the Versailles system, included not only diplomatic and economic but especially military coop­eration. The German foreign policy line had developed out of the struggle between German "Westernizers" and "Easternizers," between supporters of close ties with the Soviet Union and advocates of a Western orientation. Among those favoring the Eastern orientation were the Reichswehr, con­servative politicians, and some industrialists; the Westernizers were pri­marily Social Democrats.

It is easy to understand why Stalin's dislike for the Social Democrats— for socialists in general—was particularly keen with regard to the German Social Democrats. Stalin's leaning toward the conservative elements in Germany can be explained not only by their support for a pro-Soviet ori­entation but also by the general secretary's partiality for anyone who favored firm, authoritarian rule. The Soviet Union's relations with Fascist Italy, for example, were excellent from the moment Mussolini came to power. Alek- sandr Barmin writes that in 1924 the Soviet ambassador to Italy, Yurenev, invited Mussolini to dinner. The day before the dinner, Giacomo Matteotti, a socialist and leader of the opposition, was kidnapped (and subsequently killed) by the Fascists. Italian Communists and liberals demanded that Yurenev withdraw his invitation. The Soviet ambassador refused to do this and ceremoniously received И Duce.⁹³ During the First Five-Year Plan, Italy received huge orders from the Soviet Union for industrial equipment, and Italian industrialists in turn offered the Soviet Union long-term credits guaranteed by their government.⁹⁴

The "second-floor" aspect of Soviet foreign policy—involving the Com­intern—centered on one main task, the implementation of the decisions of the Sixth Comintern Congress, held in the summer of 1928, especially the decision that the main enemy was "the social fascists." This phrase, first put into circulation by Zinoviev in 1922, referred to the Social Dem­ocrats and implied not only that they were the main enemies of the working class but also that the real fascists were not a great danger. Moscow viewed the growing power of the Nazis (who won 6.5 million votes in Germany in 1930) as a rather positive phenomenon. It showed, according to the Com­intern leaders, that the masses were losing their illusions about parliament and democracy. Besides, the Nazis were enemies of the Western democra­cies and, as Stalin saw it, would not be able to maintain a pro-Western orientation. In 1931 Stalin asked Heinz Neumann, a leader of the German Communist party (KPD), "Don't you think that if the nationalists came to power in Germany they would occupy themselves solely with the West, so that we would be able to build socialism freely here?"⁹⁵ The KPD was given orders from Moscow to wage a relentless struggle against the Social Dem­ocrats, particularly against the left wing. In submitting to these orders, the Communists not infrequently joined forces with the Nazis to fight the so­cialists. This meant an abrupt change of tactics for the German Communists. Just the day before, the party had still followed Neumann's slogan: "Hit the fascists wherever you meet them." Stalin, who had decided on this change of policy, summoned three members of the German leadership to Moscow, Thaelmann, Neumann, and Remmele. After their return, they announced the new orders: the Social Democrats are the enemy.

Many historians have accepted the view that in paving the way for Hitler's victory Stalin was following the formula: a victory for Hitler today means victory for the Communists tomorrow. This notion was widely accepted in Communist circles in Germany in the early 1930s. Actually Stalin's policy with regard to Germany was shaped by three factors. The first was hatred for the Social Democrats. But this feeling was not a personal phobia. All the Bolsheviks shared it, including Trotsky. True, he opposed the term social fascist, but at the same time he opposed any alliance with parties and organizations that refused to break with reformism or wanted to revive social democracy.

The attitude of Stalin and Trotsky toward social democracy and nazism in the 1930s clearly shows the difference between the two heirs of Lenin and no less clearly shows that Stalin was the genuine Leninist. From 1931 to 1941, without any shame or hesitation, Stalin carried out at least four 180-degree turns in foreign policy, guided solely by his own interests. In June 1933, after Hitler had come to power, the magazine Communist In­ternational ridiculed a suggestion by the "Austro-Marxists" (as the Social Democrats of Austria were called):

The Austro-Marxists suggest that the USSR make an alliance with the "great democracies" on an international scale in order to fight fascism.... The

social fascists advise the Soviet proletariat to enter into an alliance with "democratic" France and its vassals against German and Italian fascism. The social fascists seem to have forgotten the existence of French, British, and American imperialism.⁹⁶

Within less than a year the "Soviet proletariat" did precisely what the Austro-Marxists had advised. But Trotsky stuck to the old position. Even in 1938 he argued:

What in fact would a bloc of the imperialist democracies against Hitler mean? The shackles and leg irons of Versailles in a new form, but even heavier, bloodier, more difficult to bear. ... To be allied with imperialism in a struggle against fascism is the same as being allied with the devil against his horns and claws.⁹⁷

By 1938 Stalin was an ally of the democracies and Trotsky criticized him unmercifully for betraying the cause of the proletariat and the world revolution. In June 1940 Trotsky still insisted on his position: "A socialist who advocates defense of the capitalist 'homeland' plays a role just as reactionary as the peasants of the Vend6e who fought to defend the feudal order, that is, their very own chains."⁹⁸ This time Trotsky found himself in the same camp with Stalin, who had managed to change camps again by concluding an alliance with Hitler in 1939. Trotsky gave the impression of a clock that had stopped working in 1917 and Stalin one of a clock that runs in whatever direction its owner wishes. Each claimed, of course, that his was the only correct time, since it corresponded to the laws of history.

Hostility toward the Social Democrats was the first element of Stalin's policy vis-^-vis Germany. The second element was the conviction that the Nazis were nationalists whose main concern was to oppose the Versailles system. In 1923 Karl Radek had tried to use the rising Nazi party as a force to help destroy the Weimar Republic and thereby contribute to a Communist revolution. Radek gave the Nazis their first hero, Schlageter, who was shot by the French in the occupied Ruhr, by making a famous funeral speech in his honor, a speech approved by Stalin and Zinoviev. Radek expressed the conviction of the leaders of the Comintern that the "vast majority of the nationally minded masses will belong not to the capitalist camp but to the workers' camp," that "hundreds of Schlageters" would come over to the camp of the revolution.⁹⁹ Hitler, in turn, expressed the belief to his comrades that a Communist could always make a good Nazi, but a Social Democrat never could.

Finally, the third element was fear of seeing the Communists come to power in Germany. At the Fourth Congress of the Comintern, Zinoviev said: "We know very well that in only a few years, many of the industrial countries will outdistance us and occupy first place in the Comintern and then, as Comrade Lenin said, we will become a backward Soviet country among developed Soviet countries." Zinoviev apparently had nothing against this prospect. Stalin was categorically opposed. He had no intention of yielding first place in the Comintern.

In the 1930s a new and important factor appeared on the world political scene: pro-Soviet public opinion. The cultivation of Western public opinion began right after the October revolution. Its effects were described by the American journalist George Popov in his book The Cheka, which tells of his arrest in 1922: "One of the greatest political successes of the Moscow despots is to have conditioned world opinion in such a way that anyone who dares to discuss the shortcomings of the Soviet state, even though they are undeniable, is declared 'anti-Bolshevik' and accused of lacking objec­tivity."¹⁰⁰

In the eyes of the Western intelligentsia, the world economic crisis transformed the Soviet Union, the land of the five-year plan, into a paradise on earth. Arthur Koestler, who visited the Soviet Union in 1932—33 and wrote about it with the same enthusiasm as all the other Western writers, journalists, and businessmen, made the following remark much later, when he was settling his scores with the past in his autobiography: "If history itself had been a supporter of communism, it would not have been able to synchronize so perfectly the gravest crisis of the Western world and the first phase of the Russian industrial revolution. The contrast was so strong that it inevitably led to this conclusion: they are the future, we are the past."¹⁰¹ Soviet planning was contrasted to the chaos of the Western econ­omy, and the absence of unemployment in the Soviet Union to the millions of unemployed in the West.

The term iron curtain came into general use after Churchill's speech in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946. Goebbels had used it before Churchill, but the first to do so "was the Russian writer Vasily Rozanov in 1917: "With a clank, a squeal, and a groan, an iron curtain has descended over Russian history. The show is over. The audience has risen from its seats. It is time for people to put on their coats and go home. They look around. There are no more coats and no more homes."¹⁰² To Rozanov, the iron curtain was the revolution, which interrupted the course of Russian history. The term was used in the same sense in 1921 by an emigr6 writer named Polyakov.

Soviet propagandists also used the term, but in a different sense. In 1930, an article entitled "The Iron Curtain" appeared in Literaturnaya gazeta. Its author, Lev Nikulin, began with these words:

When there is a fire on the stage, the stage is separated from the auditorium by an iron curtain. From the point of view of the bourgeoisie, there is a conflagration in Soviet Russia that has lasted for twelve years in a row. Pulling on the ropes with all their might, they have tried to lower the curtain little by little, so that the fire does not spread to the orchestra pit.¹⁰³

A fire had indeed been raging in the Soviet Union. By 1930 it had devoured millions of people, but the West knew nothing about it—the West did not want to know. The end of the NEP and the coming of the "Great Change" meant, in particular, the end of all connections with the outside world that were not totally monitored by the authorities. Unsupervised contacts had still been possible in the latter half of the 1920s.

The Soviet Union's isolation from the rest of the world was possible only through the complicity of the West. It was not difficult to isolate the Soviet people: the strictest censorship, no more individual trips abroad, no cor­respondence with foreigners or conversations with them, and incessant propaganda. Koestler was rather surprised by the questions he, a German Communist, was asked by the Soviet people concerning the situation in the West:

"When you left the bourgeois Press was your ration card withdrawn and were you kicked out at once from your room?" "What is the average number per day of French working class families starving to death (a) in rural areas, (b) in the towns?" "By what means have our comrades in the West succeeded in temporarily staving off the war of intervention which the finance-capitalists are preparing with the aid of the Social Fascist traitors?"¹⁰⁴

Koestler added that these questions were always asked, the same ones in every town he visited, and that they were asked in neo-Russian, "Dzhu- gashvilian" language (Stalin's original name was Dzhugashvili).

The ignorance of the Soviet people was the result of the combined efforts of the "organs" and the propaganda machine. But the scores of books, the hundreds and hundreds of articles written about the Soviet Union by French, German, English, and American democrats, liberals, and conservatives who had been authorized to travel in the land that was building socialism reinforced the iron curtain from the Western side by not allowing people in the West to learn the truth about the Soviet Union.

Journalists who had lived for a long time in the Soviet Union, such as Walter Duranty, the New York Times correspondent in Moscow, participated in the deception. Their reasons varied widely: a desire not to offend the Soviet authorities, fear of being considered "unobjective," a desire to pro­mote their own government's policies. Western correspondents concealed, distorted, and interpreted the facts falsely. It was with their help that the monstrous extent of the famine of 1931—1933 was concealed from the world.

Many Western intellectuals saw the October revolution as the dawn of a new era. To them the Great Depression of the 1930s signaled the end of Western civilization. They believed that the Soviet Union represented a joyous tomorrow for all mankind. "I have seen the future and it works," declared Lincoln Steffens, an influential American journalist and true friend of the Soviet Union. The eminent British Fabians Sydney and Beatrice Webb published a book entitled Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? They answered the question in no uncertain terms. It was a new civiliza­tion.¹⁰⁵ "I have never eaten so well as during my trip to the Soviet Union," announced the famous master of paradox Bernard Shaw, who visited the country of the future at the height of the famine. On the eve of his departure he entered the following in the visitor's book at Moscow's Metropol Hotel: 'Tomorrow I leave this land of hope and return to our Western countries of despair."¹⁰⁶ Ella Winter, an American who was in the Soviet Union in 1932, spoke of certain momentary "difficulties" in terms of labor pains: "Is a woman happy bearing the long-awaited child? They are giving birth to a new world, a new world outlook, and in this process questions of personal gratification become secondary."¹⁰⁷ After traveling in the Soviet Union in 1934, the Labourite Harold Laski announced: "Never in history has man attained the same level of perfection as in the Soviet regime."¹⁰⁸

Arthur Koestler explained the thought process he went through on his visit to the Soviet Union to gather materials for an enthusiastic book about the land of socialism. He reasoned dialectically. The standard of living was low, but it had been lower under the tsars. The workers lived better in the capitalist countries, but their situation was growing worse, while in the Soviet Union workers' conditions were improving.

The main argument in the minds of all Western devotees of the new society was that things would be different when the revolution came in their own country. This was the reasoning of French, English, and Americans alike. Edmund Wilson, the influential American literary critic, even pro­posed in an "Appeal to Progressives" that they "take communism out of the hands of the Communists" in order to build it themselves.¹⁰⁹ In the Soviet Union, he wrote, "I felt as though I was in a moral sanctuary, where the light never stops shining."¹¹⁰

The enthusiastic international campaign by intellectual "friends of the Soviet Union" rendered enormous practical service to Stalin's country. Pub­lic opinion was won over. A New York travel bureau recruited workers for the Soviet Union with publicity like this: "Come to Soviet Russia. Intel­lectuals and workers of every profession, both men and women, are cordially invited to Soviet Russia... where the greatest social experiment in the world is taking place, amidst a myriad of colorful nationalities, marvelous scenery, splendid architecture, and exotic civilizations."¹¹¹ Largely influ­enced by public opinion, the United States recognized the Soviet Union in 1933, after establishing close economic and cultural ties with it.

A highly characteristic trait of the pro-Soviet campaign was its language. All the books written in this period about the Soviet Union, whether in German, French, or English, by professional hack writers like Anna Louise Strong or refined aesthetes like Edmund Wilson, seem to have been written in the same "Dzhugashvilian" Soviet language. The lies that were being purveyed, whether consciously or unconsciously, lent a similar tone and color to all such works. The virus of the lie and the instrument of its contagion (the Russian language) spread through the entire world. And it seemed normal, after the Reichstag fire, when the Gestapo began hunting down all political opponents, that the leadership of the German Communist party should declare: 'The proletariat has not lost the battle. It has not been defeated. ... This is only a temporary retreat."¹¹²

The few Western intellectuals who tried to poke a hole in the iron curtain, to expose the conspiracy of lies about the Soviet Union and write the truth about it, were pitilessly ostracized from the camp of progressive humanity. This is what happened to the Romanian writer Panait Istrati in the early 1930s, for example, as it had to the American Max Eastman in the late 1920s.

Apologists for the Soviet Union submissively accepted all the twists and turns of Stalinist foreign policy, explaining them in the first half of the 1930s as a necessity for undermining imperialist and social fascist plots; in the second half of the 1930s and thereafter—as Stalin's wisdom. They glorified his genius even more shamelessly, if it is possible, than did those in the Soviet Union. A noted English biologist warmly recited a story about how Stalin personally had gone at night to a railroad freight station in Moscow with the sole purpose of helping the stevedores.¹¹³ Heinrich Mann maintained that for Stalin, Geist (spirit) is more important than Macht (physical might), and on and on.

"LIFE HAS BECOME MORE JOYOUS"

When Panait Istrati, a Romanian novelist, vagabond, and revolutionary, during his 1927—28 stay in the Soviet Union, expressed his disillusion with things in the land of socialism, he was told, "One can't make an omelette without breaking eggs." He retorted: "I can see the broken eggs. [But] where's this omelette of yours?"¹¹⁴

The eggs were broken relentlessly, and after the building-and-wrecking machine of collectivization and industrialization had been at work for a while one could begin to see the outline of the "omelette." On December 13, 1931, Stalin gave an interview to the German writer Emil Ludwig, the biographer of great men. "The task to which I have devoted my life... is the strengthening of the socialist state, and that means the international state."¹¹⁵ The word was spoken: the strengthening of the state, which was a revision of all the theories of that time that were considered orthodox Marxist. At the root of these theories was an army of quotations from Marx asserting that the state would soon wither away. Stalin still used the adjective international, but the main part was the noun state and the verb to strengthen. The cement for this state was to be fear. Emil Ludwig asked Stalin: "It seems to me that a large part of the Soviet population is experiencing terror, fear in the face of Soviet power, and that to a certain extent the stability of Soviet power is based on this fear."¹¹⁶ Stalin answered: "You are mistaken ... Do you really think that it would be possible to retain power for fourteen years and to have the backing of the masses, millions of people, owing to methods of intimidation and fear? No, that is impossible." But, he added: 'There is a small portion of the population who really fear Soviet authority and fight it. ... But here it is a question not only of a policy intended to intimidate these groups, which really do exist. Everyone knows that we Bolsheviks do not limit ourselves to intimidation; we go much farther, to the point of liquidating this bourgeois segment."¹¹⁷ Stalin corrected the German writer: not intimidation but liquidation of part of the population— the "bourgeois segment." It is doubtful however, that this correction could calm the part of the population that was considered beyond the pale and destined for liquidation.

During the First Five-Year Plan, a series of laws aimed at strengthening the government was passed. Some tightened up labor discipline: hundreds of thousands of peasants who had arrived in the cities and factories were to be "reeducated," turned into proletarians through forcible administrative measures.

A September 1929 resolution of the Central Committee made the director of an enterprise its master, its individual boss. Up to this time, an enterprise was headed by a "triangle": the director, the party secretary, and the president of the trade union committee. Now the director had the right to make all decisions autonomously: he could fire workers without notifying the trade unions, which in 1933 were formally dissolved and merged with the Commissariat of Labor. (The resolution said that the trade unions were being dissolved at their own request.) For an unauthorized absence from work (even for a single day) a worker could be prosecuted. But the director, who had broad rights, also lived under a threat. If the enterprise did not fulfill the plan or if the quality of production was poor, the director could be prosecuted. 'The labor code not only did not advance the norms and decrees of the first years of the dictatorship of the proletariat, on a number of points it actually retreated."¹¹⁸

In August 1932 the cruelest of a series of laws aimed at "strengthening state discipline" was adopted. It was a resolution "guarding the property of state enterprises, kolkhozes, and cooperatives and reinforcing public socialist ownership." Since everything in the Soviet Union was public property, the law applied to all government employees, including collective farmers (who in fact were the main targets of this law). A peculiar feature of this law was its "application of legal repression" by means of only one punishment: "the supreme measure of social defense: execution by shooting, with confiscation of all property." In the case of extenuating circumstances, execution was replaced by "deprivation of freedom for a period of not less than ten years, with confiscation of all property."¹¹⁹ This law was soon extended "by analogy" to "a broad range of crimes... including specula­tion, sabotage by state farm workers, theft of seed, etc."¹²⁰ Today Soviet historians admit, "The law of August 7 was excessively severe and insuf­ficiently worked out from the legal point of view. Malicious embezzlers and those who committed utterly insignificant misdemeanors alike came under its provisions."¹²¹ But it was precisely its maximum cruelty, its universality, that made this law one of the most essential instruments in "strengthening the state."

No less important was the law adopted at the end of 1932 that introduced the system of internal passports. Just two years earlier such passports had been called "the most effective instrument of police pressure and of ex­tortionist policies in so-called police states."¹²² Now they became the latest achievement on the road to socialism. The passports limited citizens' free­dom of movement and facilitated control over them. Above all, since the passports were issued only to city dwellers, the system tied collective farmers to the land. The prohibition against unauthorized resignation from an enterprise and the right of the Commissariat of Labor to transfer skilled workers and specialists to other locations or branches of industry in a sense also tied city inhabitants "to the land." All citizens became servants of the state, which assigned them their place of work and prohibited them from quitting, on pain of severe punishment.

Another law, enacted on June 8, 1934, crowned the system by which the population was now enslaved: "betrayal of the homeland" became pun­ishable by death. This law definitively rehabilitated the notion of "home­land." That term now referred to the Soviet state—which by party and state decree was projected retroactively into Russian history. The law also revived the term punishment, which had not been used since 1924. Similarly, the state abandoned the earlier concept of "reeducating" transgressors and instead announced its strict intention to punish them. In the decade fol­lowing the revolution, the prevailing view was the Marxist notion that being determines consciousness. Consequently, by altering being, that is, the economic conditions of one's environment, the state could alter conscious­ness. With the exception of those who should be exterminated as incurable, it was possible to correct, to reeducate, the rest. But in 1934 it was decreed that the individual, not society, was responsible. It was his fault if he could not overcome the "birthmarks of capitalism," the "remnants of the past," and he ought to be punished, for although his being had changed, his consciousness remained unaltered.

Finally, the law of June 8, 1934, rehabilitated the family: its members became collectively responsible for any flagrantly criminal deed committed by one of them. Members of the family who knew of the intentions of a "traitor to the homeland" could be sentenced to prison camp for a period of two to five years, while those who did not know could be exiled for five years. (The last measure was not repealed until 1960.) This notion of collective responsibility demonstrated that the state was interested in re­viving a strong family. A new family and marriage code would be adopted in 1936, but as early as 1934 the change in attitude was evident. The restoration of the destroyed family had begun, but on a new basis. Each Soviet family had to accept a new member, the Soviet state.

At the end of the First Five-Year Plan, a sword of Damocles hung over every Soviet citizen: they were all equal, for they were all on the brink of a precipice and they were all afraid. Stalin had explained to Emil Ludwig very well how the system of terror works: if a group of the population is destined to be liquidated, it is completely natural for a hierarchy of fear to arise. Everyone is afraid, but to different degrees, and the fear involves different punishments. Moreover, everyone recalls the existence of those destined for liquidation and is even more afraid of falling into this category. At the same conference of Marxist students of the agrarian question in December 1929 at which Stalin gave the signal for the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class," Yuri Larin explained that this liquidation did not mean that all kulaks would be shot immediately. It sufficed to execute some of the condemned and let the others wait.

During the First Five-Year Plan, the specific features of Stalin's policy were definitively developed. He would draw the string taut, and at the last moment, when it was at the breaking point, he would relax the tension, only to tighten it again with still greater force. He often drew it tight and relaxed it almost simultaneously. Some American historians call the last year or two of the First Five-Year Plan "the great retreat." That was precisely the impression Stalin wished to give: after the insane figures of the first Stalin five-year plan, even a step backward to figures that were just as unrealizable but more modest seemed like a victory for common sense.

In 1932 collective farmers were allowed to cultivate private plots once again, but that was the same year that the law of August 7 was passed. The Soviet press sounded the alarm: in the giant factories, the shops, the sovkhozes (state, as opposed to collective, farms), the lunchrooms, "the individual had been forgotten." Pravda was indignant: "It is time to put an end to the bureaucratic, manor lord disdain for questions of public catering and to understand finally that there is no task more noble for a Communist than improving the condition of the workers."¹²³ Such an appeal in the fifteenth year of the proletarian revolution might seem strange had it not been launched at the very moment when conditions for the working class were worse than at any time since the civil war.

In 1928 the Central Committee had passed a special resolution that branded the technical intelligentsia a class enemy. In 1931 a secret directive called for improving the attitude toward the technical intelligentsia as well as their material situation; but in 1933 a new resolution demanded a redoubled effort against "wreckers."

In the course of the First Five-Year Plan, an intricate hierarchical system of privileges took shape. During war communism, only a norrow segment of leaders enjoyed privileges; during the NEP, some privileges of a material kind slipped out of the party's control. Money opened the way to the good life, independent of the party and the state (if you did not, of course, take into account the permanent fear that nagged at the Nepmen). During the five-year plan, the stratum of leaders was broadened considerably, and the party, that is to say, Stalin, became the exclusive dispenser of all privileges. But he granted privileges not only to the leaders but to all the citizens. His article, "Dizzy with Success," was an authorization for peasants to leave the collective farms (if only for a few months). His declaration, "Life has become more joyous, comrades; life has become gayer" (at the most acute period of the famine) was a directive for everyone to "be merry." After receiving this directive, Komsomol leader Kosarev tried to persuade young people: "It is wrong to think that we are against personal well-being, against comfortably furnished rooms, tidiness, fashionable clothes and shoes, that we crush any aspiration for individual desires. ... We are not against music, we are not against love, we are not against flowers."¹²⁴

Everyone who was forbidden to do anything was forbidden at the request of the workers; everyone who was authorized to do something was authorized to do so by the party, that is, Stalin. The struggle against asceticism, declared in 1932, became the next weapon for strengthening the state. Ascetics had nothing to lose but their ideas. If Stalin granted material benefits to those who appreciated them, he could also take them away. Those who lost favor with Stalin could lose their apartments, positions, and the "special rations" that went with a favored position. In 1932, Isaac Babel, who was in Paris, had a conversation with Boris Souvarine. The author oiRed Cavalry portrayed Stalin in colorful terms in the early 1930s, just the way his contemporaries, people close to the "court," saw him. Babel described how Stalin summoned an executive of the Commissariat of Nationalities whom the Politburo had decided to punish for some in­fraction. Stalin announced his punishment, seized his identification cards one by one for every establishment the man had worked for, confiscated his party card, and when the demoted man was about to leave called him back: "Hand over your pass to the Kremlin dining hall."¹²⁵

During the First Five-Year Plan a state was built up on the basis of a very complicated system of privileges and fear of their loss. This system was sound, for famine and poverty reigned; therefore, everything became a privilege. Everyone depended on a higher benefactor, just as in the feudal system vassals depended on their suzerain. One need only give a nudge to one "benefactor" to nudge an endless series of favor seekers and favor granters.

The Stalinist state needed a Stalinist society. The revolution had de­stroyed the old order, and a kind of hybrid society, the not quite dead remnants of the old order and the beginnings of the new postrevolutionary society, had survived under the NEP; during the First Five-Year Plan the society of the NEP era was destroyed. Out of the debris of the prerevolu- tionary and NEP societies, a new society was formed according to the specifications of the Great Builder, as Radek called Stalin. This society had no need at all for ascetics or for the followers of any ideas, including Marxists: it needed doers.

In 1931 the Central Committee passed a resolution on schools. The schools returned to the old methods, courses, lessons, and themes con­demned by the revolution. Commissar of Education Lunacharsky, the former symbol of the revolutionary school, was replaced by Andrei Bubnov, who had served for many years as the head of the Political Directorate of the Red Army. Three hundred fifty "experienced party functionaries" and one hundred Komsomol members were sent into the schools, which had been overwhelmed by an "alien element," as the Central Committee resolution put it. In 1932 all experiments in the realm of education were branded "leftist deviations" and "latent Trotskyism." "Firm schedules," "firm dis­cipline," and a whole gamut of punishments, right up to expulsion, were introduced in the schools.

The role of the school as an "educational," "civilizing" factor was as­signed to the prison system and the concentration camps, which developed very rapidly during the First Five-Year Plan, which included prisoner labor. In 1928 criminal legislation was reviewed and adapted to the expanding system of camps, which became necessary as a result of the sharp increase in the number of prisoners. In 1930 the task of protecting society against "particularly dangerous social offenders by means of isolation combined with socially useful labor, and by adapting them to the conditions of a working community" was entrusted to the "corrective labor" camps.¹²⁶ As early as 1929 all the camps had been placed under the direction of the OGPU, which for years had directed the archetypal camp at Solovki. The OGPU became the country's largest construction company. With a virtually limitless supply of unskilled labor at its disposal, the OGPU conducted massive arrests of engineers and technicians to manage the unskilled la­borers. A new, purely Soviet institution arose, the sharashka: a prison in which engineers, scholars, and researchers worked in their fields of spe­cialization for the interests of the state. At the large-scale building sites, in the "super-factories," the specialists were monitored by armed guards. The largest construction site of the First Five-Year Plan, the Baltic—White Sea Canal, was built by prisoners under the leadership of "engineer- wreckers." Trotsky's dream of "militarized labor" became a reality under Stalin in the form of the "penalization of labor." The gates of the camps were adorned with Stalin's words: "In the Soviet Union labor is⁴a matter of honor, prowess, and heroism."

The prisoners constituted the bottom of Soviet society; at the summit was the Leader, the Boss. In 1933, Afinogenov, after the success of The Fear, wrote a new play, The Lie. Aware of the explosiveness of his subject, he sent the text to Comrade Stalin in person. Stalin worked on the play for a long time, making corrections, cutting out parts, adding to it. Then, for lack of time, he returned the manuscript without adding the finishing touches, with the following note: "Comrade Afinogenov! The point of your play is rich in its conception, but its execution was poor."¹²⁷ It cannot be ruled out that, for Stalin, the point of the play was expressed by one of its characters: "One had to be a boss to think."¹²⁸ Several years later, at an all-union conference for the wives of Red Army commanders, one of the wives recounted her conversation in the Far East with a Gold, a represen­tative of the indigenous population. The man was seated in a boat and his wife was rowing. "Why aren't you rowing?" the lady asked him. "I am thinking," he answered. When she saw them a second time, the man was rowing while his wife sat behind him. "Now," he explained, "Stalin is doing the thinking about how I should live, so I am free to work."¹²⁹

The restructuring of society's material base was accompanied by a com­plete alteration of its superstructure. Society's spiritual life was harnessed to the state's chariot to an extent that would have seemed impossible not long before. Krylenko, the commissar of justice, renowned prosecutor, and amateur chessmaster, declared in 1932: "We must once and for all put an end to neutrality in chess. We must condemn once and for all the formula 'chess for chess's sake,' just as we do 'art for art's sake.' We must organize shock units of chess players and immediately begin to fulfill a five-year plan for chess."

The chess five-year plan was an innocent game in comparison to the "antireligion five year plan" announced on May 15, 1932. Under this plan, "by the first of May 1937 not a single house of prayer will be needed any longer in any territory of the Soviet Union, and the very notion of God will be expunged as a survival of the Middle Ages and an instrument for holding down the working masses."

All of science came under attack as well. 'The philosophical, natural, and mathematical sciences," declared the journal Marxism and the Natural Sciences, "have the same political character as the historical sciences." In 1929 the number of academicians doubled. In the elections for three Marx­ists—the philosopher Deborin, the historian Lukin, and the literary critic Friche—nine academicians, including Ivan Pavlov, voted against them in a last stand in defense of scientific freedom. After a second ballot, the Marxists were elected to the Academy. Aleksei Krylov, a mathematician and naval architect, quoting Pushkin, exhorted the resisters: "What does it matter, sir? Go ahead and kiss the villain's hand."¹³⁰

The housebreaking of the Academy of Sciences went beyond the election of Marxists. In 1930 the Academy was assigned a new task, formulated as follows: "to assist in developing a unitary scientific method based on the materialist world view, consistently orienting the entire system of scientific knowledge toward the satisfaction of the needs of the socialist reconstruction of the country and the further development of socialist society."¹³¹

In December 1930 Stalin gave an interview to a group of philosophers at the Institute of Red Professors. He called for a struggle against the "Menshevizing idealism" of Deborin and the Menshevik views of Plekhanov and urged them to pay no attention to the modesty of Lenin, who did not consider himself a professional philosopher; on the contrary, they should give the leader of the October revolution the place he deserved—that of the head of Russian Marxism, the greatest Russian Marxist philosopher, one of Marxism's leading lights together with Marx and Engels. The hint was well taken. In September 1931 Bolshevik, the organ of the Central Committee, published an article that unmasked the "Menshevizing ideal­ism" of Deborin and his school (whatever that meant) and indicated that "it was necessary to develop materialist dialectics... on the basis of the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin." Thus Stalin was elevated to the rank of a classic writer of Marxist philosophy, on a par with the other three. On the fiftieth anniversary of Marx's death Pravda explained that Marx should be studied "in accordance with" Stalin's works. The publi­cation figures for the Marxist "classics" presented in January 1934 at the Seventeenth Party Congress eloquently demonstrated that all the classics were equal, but one was more equal than the others. Marx and Engels had a circulation of 7 million, Lenin 14 million, Stalin 60.5 million. American correspondent Eugene Lyons, who was walking around Moscow on Novem­ber 7, 1933, counted all the portraits of Lenin and Stalin in the windows of the houses along Gorky Street. The count was 103 to 52 in favor of Stalin. The "four-headed portrait" soon gained great popularity: the four profiles of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin looking to the future. Goebbels saw in this portrait an excellent propaganda device and immediately pre­pared a similar one for Germany; true, it had only three profiles: Frederick the Great, Bismarck, and Hitler. This trinity also looked resolutely to the future.

Philosophical expertise was, and is, an indispensable attribute of the Leader of the Communist party, Supreme Guardian of the Doctrine, but of perhaps even greater significance is history. The conquest of history was somewhat more difficult for Stalin than it was to proclaim himself "cory­phaeus of Marxism," for history consists, in addition to theory, of facts. In October 1931 the magazines Proletarskaya revolyutsiya and Bolshevik pub­lished Stalin's article (in the form of a letter to the editor), "Some Questions Concerning the History of Bolshevism." Stalin used as a pretext an article by A. Slutsky on Lenin's views on the internal party struggle among German Social Democrats on the eve of World War I. This was certainly not a burning issue at the end of 1931, but the historical importance of this article cannot be denied. It marked the establishment of Stalin's ideological autocracy.

Stalin dictated to historians what they must do and how they must work. Their first mission was to alter the history of the party, then the history of Russia. The core of the new history of the party was the absolute infallibility of Lenin and the existence of two party leaders. Robert Tucker has observed that, in a certain sense, Lenin evolved after his death. He continued to be infallible, but "attached to his successor like a Siamese twin, he became inevitably smaller in many areas. Only the facets of his life and activities that were connected with Stalin were idealized on a grand scale."¹³² As for methodology, Stalin announced that only "archive rats" and "hopeless bu­reaucrats" could research documents and facts. The main point was a correct purpose. Interpreting Stalin's speeches in an address to the Institute of Red Professors, Kaganovich emphasized that in creating the history of the party the key task was to employ "flexible Leninist tactics." It is not important what an "authentic Bolshevik" has or has not done in his time: facts and documents must be interpreted from the point of view of the present moment.¹³³ Stalin "interpreted" Trotsky from the point of view of the present. 'Trotskyism," he wrote, "is the vanguard of the counter­revolutionary bourgeoisie"; consequently, Trotsky always was an agent of the counterrevolution.

The doctrine became firmly established, distinguishing itself in both versatility and cruelty. It could change instantaneously, switching to its antithesis, but in the interval between the changes it remained immobile. The doctrine could be expressed only in the exact words of the Leader, without even a comma changed. Stalin's letter to Proletarskaya revolyutsiya (and this was the first of many such occasions) was immediately echoed in all areas of Soviet life. The journal Proletarian Music (January 1932) ded­icated an editorial to it with the headline: "Our Tasks on the Music Front," while a lead article in the journal For Soviet Accounting (February 1932) bore the title "For Bolshevik Vigilance on the Bookkeeping Front," and the Journal of Neuropathology and Psychiatry (February 1932) published an article "For a Bolshevik Offensive on the Neuropathology Front." Stalin's letter was studied by economists, naturalists, and technicians. Maxim Gorky added his voice to the chorus: "It is vital that we know everything that has happened in the past, not as it has already been recounted, but in the light of the doctrine of Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin."¹³⁴

From Gorky to workers on the bookkeeping front, everyone responded the same way (in public, at least), not only in the territories of the Soviet Union, where Stalin's power had become absolute, but also wherever Com­munist parties, sections of the Comintern, existed. Arthur Koestler relates that in January 1935, when the Saar was preparing to vote on a referendum that would decide whether it would remain under French administration or become part of the German Reich, the Communist party ordered people to vote for "a Red Saar in a Soviet Germany."

"But there is no Soviet Germany as yet, so what do we stand for?" a miner asked the leader of a Communist cell in despair. "We stand, comrade," the

latter answered, "for a Red Saar in a Soviet Germany." "But there is no Soviet Germany, so do you mean we should vote for Hitler?" "The Central Committee," objected the secretary of the cell, "did not say you should vote for Hitler. It said you should vote for a Red Saar in a Soviet Germany." "But, comrade, until there is a Soviet Germany, would it not be best to vote for the status quo?" "By voting for the status quo," explained the secretary, "you would align yourself with the social fascist agents of French imperi­alism." 'Then who the bleeding hell are we to vote for?" cried the miner. "You are putting the question in a mechanistic manner," the secretary re­proached him. 'The only correct revolutionary policy is to fight for a Red Saar in a Soviet Germany."¹³⁵

After the elections, in which Hitler received more than 90 percent of the vote, the organ of the Saarland Communists bore this front-page head­line: "Defeat of Hitler in the Saar." According to the laws of Marxist- Stalinist dialectics, the Hitlerities, who had expected 98 percent, had suffered a defeat.

The letter to Proletarskaya revolyutsiya marked a turning point in the official attitude toward Russian history. Stalin pointed out that a history of European Marxism should be written from the point of view of the Russian Bolsheviks. They were, as Lenin had predicted in 1902, the vanguard of the international proletarian movement. The Russian revolution was the beginning of the world revolution, and it was not for the Western Marxists to give lessons to their Russian comrades, but vice versa.

On February 4, 1931, Stalin presented his view of Russian history: "The history of old Russia," said Stalin, consisted, among other things, in her constantly being beaten for her backwardness. "She was beaten by the Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal lords. She was beaten by the Polish-Lithuanian pans. She was beaten by the Anglo-French capitalists. She was beaten by the Japanese barons. She was beaten by everyone because of her backward­ness."¹³⁶ This interpretation of Russian history was still partly in accordance with the (until then) orthodox Marxist views of Pokrovsky. On May 15, 1934, a resolution "On the Teaching of the Nation's History in Soviet Schools" marked a break with the old policy regarding Russian history and the beginning of a new policy. In 1936 the Soviet press published a letter by Stalin, Zhdanov, and Kirov which was a critique of projected textbooks on the history of the Soviet Union and gave new instructions for teaching Russian history.

In 1934 Stalin, the victor, the creator of collectivization and industrial­ization, state builder, and Supreme Ideologue, took up the weapon of

Russian nationalism. In a certain sense this confirmed the predictions of Ustryalov and Dmitrievsky, but only in a certain sense. Stalin used Russian nationalism as he had used a great number of other bricks for building his empire. He needed Russian nationalism to legitimize his authority. He could not, and probably did not want to, stress continuity with the revolution and the destructive elements of the past while he was in the process of building a new state and social system. That is why he chose a new line of ancestors, the Russian princes and tsars, the builders of a mighty state. After 1934 Stalin—and all Soviet historians after him—stopped saying that "everyone had beaten" Russia. They began to say that Russia had beaten everyone. The signal was given to crush Pokrovsky's historical school. The history of Russia, which after 1917 had been revised from the point of view of the class struggle, was being revised in light of the struggle for the creation of a strong state. The people remained at the center, but for the Pokrovsky school the people wanted liberty, whereas for the Stalin school they wanted strong authority.

One of the key aspects on the "ideological front" was literature. In the first year of the First Five-Year Plan, its situation reflected, with a certain belatedness, the complex twists and turns of the intraparty struggle. Rep­resentatives of leftist views, supporters of Trotsky, were still present on the staffs of literary journals and in literary associations, and adherents of the "right" still held important posts. Bukharin, who was a specialist on the intelligentsia, was subjected to increasingly violent attacks, and Stalin began to express his own literary views more and more frequently. RAPP, the Association of Russian Proletarian Writers, assumed greater and greater control over literary life. In the summer of 1928 the Central Committee issued a new resolution on cultural questions. In its opening sentences, its most soothing passage, it cited the resolution of 1925, but further on it declared war on any "backsliding from a class position, eclecticism, or benign attitude toward an alien ideology." The resolution declared that literature, theater, the cinema, painting, music, and radio had to take part "in the struggle... against bourgeois and petit bourgeois ideology, against vodka and philistinism," as well as against "the revival of bourgeois ideology under new labels and the servile imitation of bourgeois culture."¹³⁷

The cultural revolution had begun. "Industrial and financial plans" for literature were announced, and the call went out for "shock troops" in literature, which became a very important matter—one that could not be entrusted to mere writers. "We must reexamine our list of coryphaei," wrote Literaturnaya gazeta. "It is essential to conduct a thorough purge. Along with the slogan of a cultural revolution, the task of creating a literature of the masses has taken on urgent meaning." But, explained Literaturnaya gazeta, "the good writers, the coryphaei, are incomprehensible to the masses; their style is too complicated. (The mediocrities have a much simpler style.)" Hence, "more attention to mediocre writers!"¹³⁸

Writers began to search for ways to liquidate literature. RAPP announced that art was "the most powerful weapon in the class struggle." Mayakovsky urged that writers meet society's demands. S. Tretyakov, a member of LEF (Left Front of Art) declared: "We cannot wait forever while the professional writer tosses and turns in his bed, giving birth at last to something useful and comprehensible only to himself." Tretyakov called for the creation of workshops to which literary workers would bring materials (travel diaries, biographies, etc.). Others would arrange them, and still others would cast them in a language easily understood by the masses. Marxist literary critic V. Pereverzev considered even this measure insufficient:

The creator [the working class—M. H.] does his work himself; he does not contract it out to others. ... He commands others. ... We do not contract work out to the men of LEF, nor to the men of RAPP; as the ruling power, we simply give the order to sing to anyone who knows how to sing the songs we need, and the order not to to those who do not know.¹³⁹

In January 1929 Voronsky, the principal advocate of the policy of utilizing fellow travelers in Soviet literature, was arrested for 'Trotskyism." In the fall of 1929 a campaign of denunciation against Boris Pilnyak and Evgeny Zamyatin began. They were condemned for having published their books abroad (Pilnyak's Mahogany and Zamyatin's We). This was only a pretext, for until then Soviet writers had regularly published their books abroad. Pilnyak explained that the Soviet magazine Krasnaya nov was about to publish Mahogany, and Zamyatin explained that We had appeared in the West years earlier, in 1926. Actually, the two men were chosen in order to intimidate other nonparty writers in the unaffiliated professional orga­nization, the Writers' Union. Pilnyak was the head of the Moscow branch of that organization, and Zamyatin headed the Leningrad branch.

The authorities had other grievances against both men. Pilnyak had committed a grave sin by publishing his 'Tale of the Unextinguished Moon," which told about the strange death of Red Army Commander Gavrilov on the operating table, where he had been placed by order of "Number One." It was easy to identify Commissar of War Frunze as the model for Gavrilov and Stalin as the model for "Number One." Zamyatin's sins included We and the article "I Am Afraid." Besides that, his uncompromising honesty, which he considered a necessary condition for true literature, was partic­ularly unforgivable.

Literaturnaya gazeta devoted its whole front page to the disgraced writers:

The conception of a Soviet writer is not geographical; it is social. Only the person who links himself and his work with the socialist system in the present period of reconstruction, a period in which the proletariat is attacking the remnants of capitalism, a period of fierce resistance by the class enemy, only this person can call himself a Soviet writer.¹⁴⁰

The newspapers devoted much space to indignant telegrams and reso­lutions condemning Zamyatin's and Pilnyak's "shameless conduct." This was the first time such a campaign had been conducted. Many organizations and individuals in the world of Soviet culture (people who had never read the condemned books) wrote statements with headlines like 'Traitors to the Revolution," "Fraternization with the White Guards," "Literary Sabotage," and 'Treason at the Front." Pilnyak surrendered, asked for permission to revise his book, and wrote a new novel, The Volga Flows to the Caspian, under the literary tutelage of Nikolai Ezhov, then a secretary of the Central Committee, who was to become famous later in areas other than literature. Zamyatin, for his part, wrote to Stalin saying it was impossible for him to be a writer in the Soviet Union. He requested (and with Gorky's help obtained) permission to leave the country.

At the end of 1929 a Central Committee resolution announced that the literary policies of RAPP were closest to those of the party and called for all literary forces to unite around RAPP. Mayakovsky joined RAPP and within the year committed suicide. In his work The Bathhouse (1929) he put the new credo of Soviet literature in the mouth of Pobedonosikov: "I beg you, in the name of all the workers and peasants, don't get me worked up. ... You should soothe my ears and rest my eyes, not get me worked up. ... We want to relax after all our state and civic responsibilities. Back to the classics! Learn from the great geniuses of our accursed past." Even in "stepping on the throat of his own song," Mayakovsky still got people worked up, and that was useless and harmful. If Demyan Bedny could say, "I'm not an organ grinder whom you can just order to play another tune," how much more difficult it was to tell Mayakovsky to change his tune. Yet the officially required theme songs changed daily. Trotsky, in commenting on Demyan Bedny's fall from grace (in 1932), remarked that Bedny had been able to sell himself wholesale but found it hard to do so retail, that is, to follow every minute change of orders, every political zigzag. How much harder for Mayakovsky to "sell himself retail." His suicide allowed him to enter the pantheon nonetheless. Stalin killed him a second time by naming him (in a resolution to Comrade Ezhov) "the best and most talented poet of our Soviet epoch."¹⁴¹

In 1932 a new Central Committee resolution abolished all literary schools, trends, and associations, including RAPP. This decision was like a bolt from the blue. Averbakh and his henchmen, the leaders of RAPP, had terrorized all of Soviet literature for years; now at a stroke of the pen they had been thrown from their pedestal. When Boris Souvarine asked who had influenced Stalin in this decision, Babel answered that no one had. "Stalin decides everything for himself, on his own. For two weeks he invited in and listened to Averbakh, Bezymensky, and tutti quanti. Then he de­cided: we'll get nowhere with these fellows. In the Politburo he suddenly proposed his resolution. No one batted an eye."¹⁴²

Perhaps Babel oversimplified things. Stalin's decision might have been prompted in part by his desire to win over Gorky, who detested the men of RAPP. In 1932 Stalin was a frequent guest at Gorky's house, where he met other writers as well. It was during one of these meetings that Stalin bestowed the noble title "engineers of human souls" on Soviet writers. Undoubtedly, it was at that time, after his letter to Proletarskaya revolutsiya, that Stalin decided to take personal charge of literature, as he had of philosophy and history. He needed efficient and dependable types to serve as "transmission belts," not Marxist ideologues like Averbakh. They "worked people up" too much. Instead of proletarian writers, Stalin decided to rely on fellow travelers, but only those who were ready, as Pereverzev put it, "to sing the songs we need" on command. Stalin counted heavily on Gorky's help to carry out his plan for the final subjugation of literature, and culture in general, to the party.

In 1928 Gorky, who was living on Capri, began receiving numerous letters and telegrams from Soviet institutions and individuals—writers, workers, members of the Pioneer youth organization, and so on—urging him to return to his homeland. The flood of requests, regulated by GPU head Genrikh Yagoda, reached such proportions that Gorky was unable to refuse. Other factors undoubtedly played a part: nostalgia for his homeland, the tempting prospect of assuming first place in Russian culture, and the persuasive arguments of his secretary Kryuchkov, a GPU agent.

At the end of 1928 Gorky returned to Moscow. There is no doubt that many in the Soviet Union looked forward to his return, for his authority as a great writer, a great humanist, and a defender of the oppressed was undeniable. Moreover, he was not a party member. Until 1933 Gorky made occasional visits to the Soviet Union, where he had at his disposal a sumptuous house in Moscow and two luxurious villas (one outside Moscow, the other in the Crimea) and where many factories, schools, even corrective labor camps, and an entire city had been named after him. In 1933 he was refused a visa to leave for Italy and remained in the Soviet Union until his death in July 1936. In 1932 Souvarine asked Babel about Gorky. Babel told him that whenever Stalin left Moscow for one of his country places, his responsibilities were assumed by Kaganovich, but on a more general plane, Gorky was "the number two man."

Civic responsibilities changed Gorky. He continued as before to stig­matize injustice, hunger, and poverty, but only when they occurred in the West. For his homeland he had only praise and approval. In 1930, on the first day of the "Industrial party" trial, he wrote an article that began: "In Moscow the Supreme Court of the workers and peasants of the Union of Socialist Soviets is trying a group of people who organized a counterrevo­lutionary plot against workers' and peasants' power."¹⁴³ The great writer could have waited for the end of the trial to make his pronouncement, but no, he already knew that "a counterrevolutionary plot" had been organized. Just two weeks later, Pravda and Izvestia published a new article by Gorky, 'To the Humanists." The proletarian humanist fell upon the bourgeois humanists, particularly "Professor Albert Einstein and Mr. Thomas Mann," for having signed a protest statement by the German League for Human Rights against what Gorky called "the execution of forty-eight criminals, organizers of the famine in the Soviet Union."¹⁴⁴ The Gorky who had pro­tested the death penalty in the Bolshevik-organized trial of SR leaders in 1922 and who had railed unceasingly against the monstrous cruelty of bourgeois justice had disappeared. Forty-eight directors of the Soviet food industry were shot after a secret trial—or without a trail, but Gorky said, "I know very well the indescribable vileness of the actions of those forty- eight."¹⁴⁵

Aleksandr Orlov, once a highly placed Chekist, wrote that after hearing about the execution of the forty-eight Gorky became hysterical and accused Yagoda of killing innocent people in order to dump the blame for the famine on them.¹⁴⁶ If this is true it puts Gorky in a worse light still, for in 1931 he returned to Capri for a vacation from "building socialism" and could have publicly condemned the executions then. Instead, he spoke out against a new group of defendants in another one of Stalin's show trials. This time it was the trial of a group of Mensheviks, which took place March 1-8, 1931. Gorky not only agreed with the verdict ("all of these criminals" had been involved in "wrecking activity over the course of several years"); he also believed that not all of them had been caught and that the hunt should continue.¹⁴⁷ One peculiarity of the Menshevik trial and Gorky's article about it was that among the accused were people he knew well, including a close friend, Nikolai Sukhanov, author of a seven-volume history of the Russian revolution. Gorky did not forgo the opportunity to mock Sukhanov, calling him a "conceited scholar."¹⁴⁸

In his assertion of the need for "the consoling lie," the lovely mirage, as the best means of educating the people, Gorky displayed such zeal that he earned a gentle rebuke from Stalin himself. In one of the most tragicomic episodes in the history of Soviet culture, Gorky called for the prohibition of self-criticism in the Soviet Union. Stalin admonished him: "We cannot do without self-criticism. We really cannot, Aleksei Maksimovich."¹⁴⁹

In his speeches, articles, and letters to foreign friends, Gorky denounced the "legends" about forced labor and terror, collectivization and famine in the Soviet Union. He denied the "very vulgar fable that there is an individual dictator in the Soviet Union."¹⁵⁰

After abolishing all literary trends and associations, Stalin wanted to see the establishment of a single writers' organization under the firm control of the party and state. It was partly to accomplish this task that he placed Gorky in charge of all Soviet culture. At the First Congress of Soviet Writers in the summer of 1934, Gorky coped marvelously with his task. He intro­duced a new obligatory literary style, an "artistic method" that soon became obligatory in all cultural fields: "socialist realism." This was the method of the consoling lie, which Gorky said was necessary to create a "new reality."¹⁵¹ The writers' congress enthusiastically adopted this new ethic for all "engineers of human souls" and builders of the "new reality." From the platform of the congress Viktor Shklovsky denounced Dostoevsky: "If Fedor Mikhailovich were here, we would have to judge him as the heirs of hu­manity, as people who are judging a traitor. Dostoevsky cannot be under­stood outside of the revolution, nor can he be understood as anything but a traitor. "¹⁵² Dostoevsky had done his time and did not need to fear for the future, but the delegates to the writers' congress engaged in more contem­porary denunciations: they denounced each other.¹⁵³ They also reported with satisfaction that "in our kolkhoz fields ... Pioneer children catch their fathers, accomplices of the class enemy, in the act of stealing socialist property and bring them before the revolutionary tribunals."¹⁵⁴ The writers reported with equal pride their trip to the Baltic—White Sea Canal, a trip that produced the most disgraceful book in the history of literature, a glorification of the concentration camp.¹⁵⁵

Last but not least, the congress sang the praises of Stalin. Everyone said as much as their literary talents would permit. "Comrade Stalin is a mighty genius of the working class," said one delegate.¹⁵⁶ Another called him "the most beloved of all leaders of any epoch and any people."¹⁵⁷ Here too Gorky set the tone. "Leaderism," he said, "is a sickness of our century. Internally, it was the result of decadence, impotence, and the poverty of individualism;

externally, it was manifested in the form of such purulent abscesses as, for example, Ebert, Noske, Hitler, and similar heroes of capitalist reality. Here, where we have created a socialist reality, such abscesses are of course impossible."¹⁵⁸ He concluded with, "Long live the party of Lenin, the leader of the proletariat. Long live the leader of the party, Joseph Stalin."¹⁵⁹

The First Soviet Writers' Congress completed the process of nationalizing literature, begun after the October revolution. The congress approved the Central Committee's decision to establish a single organization for all writ­ers, the Soviet Writers' Union, under the direction of a representative of the Central Committee, Aleksandr Shcherbakov. One could count on the fingers of one hand the writers who did not take the oath of loyalty to the party: Bulgakov, Platonov, Mandelstam, and Akhmatova. Congresses in other cultural spheres were held on the model of the writers' congress. They too established single unions for everyone in their field and took a loyalty oath. Stalin paid special attention to the cinema, which Lenin had called the most important of the arts. As far back as 1928 a group of directors, including Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Kozintsev, and Trauberg, had asked for a "firm ideological dictatorship in the field of the cinema."¹⁶⁰ In January 1935 they greeted this dictatorship. Aleksandr Dovzhenko de­clared: 'The artists of the Soviet Union have created an art founded on 'yes,' on the conception: I uplift, I inspire, I educate."¹⁶¹

By 1934 collectivization had been completed, industrialization begun, and the superstructure nationalized. The country's spiritual life, with the active help of the "creative intelligentsia," the "masters of thought," was placed entirely at the service of the state, that is, of Stalin.

Gorky held "the traitor Dmitrievsky" up to shame for having written, "We are slaves. We need teachers, leaders, prophets." This was only true under capitalism, Gorky harangued. 'They willingly crawl after any leader, expecting exactly the same thing from each of them: perhaps the Boss will expand the limits of'philistine good fortune' under capitalism."¹⁶² He urged people not to follow "just any leader," but only the ones who were building a "new, socialist reality" in the "land illuminated by Lenin's genius, in the land where Joseph Stalin's iron will works tirelessly and miraculously."¹⁶³

The enormity of Gorky's activity in his final years has not yet been adequately judged. It was primarily with his help that the spiritual en­slavement of the Soviet people was made possible. He called on the people to follow "that single guiding idea which does not exist anywhere else in the world, the idea that has been soundly formulated in Stalin's six con­ditions."¹⁶⁴ Abusing his prestige as a great writer and humanist, Gorky never stopped trying to pound into the heads of Soviet citizens the notion that the GPU was the country's most important cultural force. He maintained that "the work of the Chekists in the camps clearly demonstrates the hu­manism of the proletariat."¹⁶⁵ In January 1936 he dreamed: "In fifty years, when things will be a little calmer and the first half of the century will seem like a splendid tragedy, a proletarian epic, it is probable that art as well as history will then be able to do justice to the wonderful cultural work of the rank-and-file Chekists in the camps."¹⁶⁶ His dream was realized much sooner: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, an artist and historian, did justice to the cultural work of the Chekists in Gulag Archipelago.

Among the most shameful pages of Gorky's prose, his letter 'To the Women Shockworkers at the Building Site of the Moscow—Volga Canal" takes first place. Gorky, the defender of women, who for decades had bemoaned their fate in tsarist Russia, addressed the women prisoners who were being killed off by inhumanly hard labor in a Soviet "corrective labor camp": "Your labor once again demonstrates to the world what a healthy effect work can have on people, work that has been given meaning by the great truth of bolshevism, and it demonstrates how splendidly the Lenin— Stalin cause has done in organizing women."¹⁶⁷

Thanks to such spiritual teachers Stalin was able by 1934 to assert unlimited power over the country and the people. He was right when he told Emil Ludwig that he could not hold power by fear alone. He needed lies as well. The "spiritual teachers" created a mirage that they tried to make people believe by claiming that the mirage was more real than reality, that it was reality.

Having completed the base and the superstructure, Stalin moved on to the next task, to the final on the road to socialism. On December 1, 1934, at Smolny in Leningrad, Sergei Kirov was killed.

CHAPTER