The late Dmitri Volkogonov emerged in the last decade of his life as the preeminent Russian historian of this century. His crowning achievement is the account of the seven General Secretaries of the Soviet Empire in Autopsy for an Empire, a book that tells the entire history of the Soviet failure.Having utilized his still-unequaled access to the Soviet military archives, Communist Party documents, and secret Presidential Archive, Volkogonov sheds new light on some of the major events of twentieth-century history and the men who shaped them. We witness Lenin's paranoia about foreigners in Russia, and his creation of a privileged system for top Party members; Stalin's repression of the nationalities and his singular conduct of foreign policy; the origins and conduct of the Korean War; Kruschev's relationship with the odious secret service chief, Beria, and his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis; Brezhnev's vanity and stupidity; a new view of Poland and Solidarity; the ossification of Soviet bureaucracy and the cynicism of the Politburo; and Mikhail Gorbachev's Leninism and his role in history.By profiling the seven successive Soviet leaders from Lenin to Gorbachev, Volkogonov also depicts in painstaking detail the progressive self-destruction of the Leninist system. In his clear-eyed character assessments and political evaluations, lucidly translated and edited by Harold Shukman, Dmitri Volkogonov has once again performed an invaluable service to twentieth-century history.
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Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov-Lenin was the founder of the Communist Party, the Soviet state and the Bolshevik system in Russia. Not only like-minded revolutionaries, but also his countless enemies saw in him the leader of a movement which threatened in time to swathe the world in the red flag.
It is surely indisputable that no single leader in the twentieth century exerted as great an influence on the course of world history as Lenin. And he managed to make his mark in a little over six years, from the moment of the October coup in 1917 to his premature death in 1924, at the age of fifty-three. Given that for nearly two of those six years he was seriously ill, and took an increasingly limited and eventually purely symbolic part in the political life of the country, his achievement seems monumental.
The historical role of this unattractive, bald, stocky man, with piercing eyes and the look of an intelligent craftsman, was enormous, if only because the entire world, except Russia herself, benefited from his experiment. Having seen the appalling methods Lenin’s government was applying to make the Russian people ‘happy’, many leaders, thinkers and public figures in other countries recoiled in horror from what they saw.
The movement for a just and classless society in Russia began with unbridled violence, denying millions of people all rights except the right to support Bolshevik policy. Even those who at first sympathized with the revolution soon saw that it would culminate in a monopoly of political power, domination of the public mind by Bolshevik-inspired myths, guaranteed poverty, physical and psychological violence and compulsory atheism, and recoiled from such a prospect. Most of the countries of the world, although not all, managed to avoid their own ‘October’.
The role of accident in history is great. A rare combination of military, political, social and personal factors in the Russia of autumn 1917 had created a situation in which it was necessary only to determine the time at which to seize the power that was, in Trotsky’s words, lying on the streets of Petrograd. And Lenin fixed the time precisely. Had it not been for his perceptiveness, the coup might never have taken place. This view was advanced by ‘the second man of the revolution’ himself, Leon Trotsky. After he had been deported from the Soviet Union in 1929, he wrote that if Lenin had not been in Petrograd in October 1917, there would have been no seizure of power. In those pre-October days, Lenin expended superhuman energy and exerted maximum pressure, demanding, inspiring, exhorting, threatening and insisting that his organization take the initiative and seize power. And he got his way.
As Trotsky wrote, things could have gone very differently without Lenin. A new and more capable general than the government’s commander-in-chief, Kornilov, might have emerged; Kerensky’s Provisional Government might somehow have managed to survive; and if Pavel Malyantovich, Kerensky’s Minister of Justice, had succeeded in carrying out the order to arrest Lenin for staging an armed uprising in Petrograd on 3-5 July,1the picture would have been very different. According to his son Vladimir, the wretched Malyantovich lamented in the 1930S: ‘If I had carried out the Provisional Government’s order to arrest Lenin, none of these horrors would have happened.’2Instead, in his seventies he was transported and shot.
But the triumphant coup did take place, and its brain, mainspring and guiding force was Ulyanov-Lenin. As a result he became the most powerful politician and revolutionary of the twentieth century. The scar he left on the face of civilization is deep. Even now, after it has become painfully clear that the seventy-year experiment launched by him was a failure, millions still admire him and his teaching. Most Russians today, however, are indifferent to the man who, perhaps motivated by the best of intentions, convinced the people to take his false path.
Lenin was a man of one dimension. He seems to have loved only one thing: power. He hated the autocracy, the bourgeoisie, landowners, Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, kulaks, the clergy, religion, liberals, the lower middle class, parliaments, reformism, compromise, social democracy, the Russian intelligentsia, the hesitant and confused—all those who were not on his side. He hated the entire old world, and therefore once the Bolsheviks were in power, it had to be swept away into the dustbin of history, as Trotsky put it. The Leninists proceeded to destroy entire classes and groups of the population, and thousands of churches. They were responsible for the loss of thirteen million lives in the civil war and for two million Russian citizens leaving the country, and, of course, for the extermination of the entire Russian royal family.
Moscow had already given the order for the murder of the Tsar and his family, and the order was being carried out, when Lenin was asked by the Copenhagen newspaper National Tidende on 17 July 1918 to comment on reports that the Tsar was dead. He replied: ‘The rumours are not true, the former Tsar is well, all these rumours are lies put out by the capitalist press.’3In fact, on the following day the Soviet government debated and fully approved the murders.
Lenin resorted to the assassination of his political enemies on other occasions. Early in 1920, hearing of the arrest of the White leader Admiral Kolchak, he ordered a coded telegram to be sent to the Bolshevik chief in Irkutsk, Smirnov: ‘… don’t publish anything at all, but after we have occupied Irkutsk send a strictly official telegram, explaining that, before our arrival, the local authorities [consisting of Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks] had done such and such under the influence of the … danger of White plots in Irkutsk.’4
The Bolsheviks took Irkutsk, and Kolchak, on 21 January, and Lenin’s instructions were carried out to the letter. The Military Revolutionary Committee sentenced Kolchak and the Chairman of the Omsk Government Council of Ministers V.N. Pepelyaev to be shot, and the sentence was carried out within a few hours. Smirnov duly sent a telegram to Pravda:
The Irkutsk revolutionary committee, knowing of plans by officers to launch a counter-revolutionary attack with the aim of overthrowing the authorities and liberating Kolchak, who had been arrested by the Czechs [the Czech Legion then roaming Siberia] and handed over to the revolutionary authorities, and not being able to communicate with the Siberian Revolutionary Committee, thanks to the telegraph lines at Irkutsk being damaged, at its session of 7 February the Revolutionary Committee, intent on averting a clash, ordered the execution of Admiral Kolchak … The sentence was carried out the same day.5
The ‘leader of the world proletariat’ was a good mentor to his bloodstained successor.
Despite his illness, Lenin managed to do a great deal in the last few years of his life. He destroyed the old empire and created a new one, eradicated the old social structure and laid the foundations for a completely different order. Having promised the Russian people peace and land, he took away the liberty they had gained in February 1917, without which land and peace were worthless. In any case, he nationalized the land, and quickly turned the First World World into a civil war which cost the country terrible losses.
Speaking at the Bolshoi Theatre on 20 November 1922, at a plenary meeting of the Moscow Soviet—his last public appearance, as it turned out—Lenin remarked that, having decided to build a new order, ‘[there] is a small, minuscule group of people, calling themselves a party, who have set their hands to this task. These Party-people are an insignificant kernel in the entire mass of the workers of Russia. This insignificant kernel set itself the task of actually changing everything and it has done so.’6
Lenin had begun building the new society within days of the October coup. He signed nearly sixty decrees in order to dispossess the landowners. As if he was afraid everything would one day go into reverse, he wrote to People’s Commissar for Justice D. Kursky: ‘Is it not time to deal with the question of destroying the tide documents of private property: notarized deeds of land-ownership, factories, buildings, and so on and so forth. Prepare for this in secret, without publicity. Seize [the property] first … In my view, the documents should be turned into pulp (you should first find out how to do this technically).’
The expeditious Kursky replied at once: ‘This is an appropriate measure and can be carried out quickly as the notary archives are in our hands.’
Lenin was satisfied, and settled the matter with another note to Kursky: ‘So, you’ll get on with this without waiting for a special instruction from the Sovnarkom (and you’ll arrange a meeting with the Commissariat of the Interior and others. But in secret.)’7 Lenin had seized the private property of the country, and was now concerned to ensure that no trace remained of documented ownership. He knew that, whatever else, it was not possible to build a new society on the foundations of the old.
In his eighteen-month career as a lawyer, Lenin had defended only four or five cases of petty thieving, and he lost virtually all of them. But in 1909, when a vicomte knocked him off his bicycle in Paris, he immediately sued, put up a vigorous case and won his action. Lenin regarded himself as a winner, whether in a petty lawsuit or in the great game of world revolution. At the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919 he announced in his greeting to the workers of Budapest: ‘Our congress is convinced that the time is not far off when Communism will conquer the entire world.’8
Such was Lenin: self-confident and cynical, strong-willed and pitiless, and unique in his single-mindedness. The Socialist Revolutionary leader Victor Chernov wrote of him: ‘Lenin does not have a broad mind, but he does have an intensive one, not creative, but versatile and in that sense inventive. Lenin had no respect for the convictions of others, nor was he touched by zeal for liberty.’9This was the man who would bring about the most profound social upheavals of the twentieth century.
‘The Evil Genius’
What did Alexander Potresov, a Menshevik who had known him well in the early days, see in Lenin that led him to describe him in 1927 as an ‘evil genius’?10‘Neither Plekhanov, nor Martov, nor anyone else,’ Potresov wrote elsewhere, ‘possessed the mysterious hypnotic effect on people that emanated from Lenin, what I might call his domination over them. People respected Plekhanov and they loved Martov, but only Lenin did they follow unquestioningly as their sole and indisputable leader. For only Lenin presented himself, especially in Russia, as the rare phenomenon of a man with an iron will and indomitable energy, and who blended fanatical faith in the movement and the cause with a no lesser faith in himself … Behind these virtues, however, lurk equally great defects, negative features which might be more appropriate in some medieval or Asiatic conqueror.’11
For his part, Lenin, in the laconic style appropriate to geniuses, wrote to the writer Maxim Gorky: ‘What a swine that Potresov is!’12 Potresov was not alone in describing Lenin as an evil genius. Mark Aldanov, an émigré novelist, wrote that ‘in one case Lenin has the character of a genius, and in a hundred others the character of a barbarian.’13
In January 1919 Lenin received a letter from an old Social Democrat acquaintance, Nikolai Rozhkov, an economist and publicist. He wrote, among other things: ‘Vladimir Ilyich, I am writing you this letter not because I expect to be heard and understood by you, but simply because I cannot remain silent … I have to make even this hopeless effort.’ He went on to say that the food situation in Petrograd was desperate, that half the city was dying of starvation. ‘Your entire food policy is based on a false foundation … Without the collaboration of private trade, neither you nor anyone else can deal with the inevitable disaster.’ He urged Lenin to adopt what would later be called the New Economic Policy, NEP. ‘You and I have moved too far apart. Perhaps it is truer to say we wouldn’t understand each other … Even this letter of mine seems to me like a bit of silly Don Quixotism. Well, in that case, let it be the first and last.’14
Lenin replied: ‘Nikolai Alexandrovich, I was very glad to receive your letter, not because of its content, but because I hope for a rapprochement on the generally common ground of Soviet work … As for freedom of trade, an economist should especially see that we cannot go back to free trade, and that we must go forward to socialism by improving the state monopoly.’ Later in his letter Lenin took up Rozhkov’s lament for the demise of parliamentarism in Russia, meaning the Constituent Assembly which the Bolsheviks had dispersed by force in January 1918. He mounted his hobby-horse: ‘history has shown that this was the universal collapse of bourgeois democracy and bourgeois parliamentarism and that we will get nowhere without civil war.’15
Rozhkov had seen the complete futility of Lenin’s policy of War Communism as early as January 1919, and had in effect proposed the New (i.e. old-capitalist) Economic Policy. Lenin, the ‘prophet’, had not seen this. He did not forget about Rozhkov, and he was unforgiving. At the end of the summer of 1922, at his initiative, the question of expelling abroad a large number of members of the Russian intelligentsia was debated. Lenin wrote a disjointed and vicious directive to Stalin, which said in part:
On the matter of deporting Mensheviks, Popular Socialists, Kadets and so on from Russia, I’d like to raise several questions, seeing that this operation, which was started before I went on leave, hasn’t been completed even now. Has the decision been taken to ‘uproot’ all the [Popular Socialists]? Peshekhonov, Myakotin, Gorenfeld, Petrishchev and the others? In my opinion, they should all be expelled. They’re worse than any [Socialist Revolutionary], as they’re more cunning. Also A.N. Potresov, Izgoev and all the staff at the Ekonomist (Ozerov and many, many others). The Mensheviks Rozanov (he’s an enemy, a cunning one), Vigdorchik, Migulo and anyone else of that ilk, Lyubov Nikolaevna Radchenko and her younger daughter (I hear they’re sworn enemies of Bolshevism); N.A. Rozhkov (he has to be expelled, he’s stubborn); S.L. Frank (the author of Methodology). Mantsev and Messing’s commission must draw up lists and several hundred of such gentlemen must be expelled abroad without mercy. We’re going to cleanse Russia for a long time to come.16
When Lenin heard that Rozhkov was ill, he modified his orders: ‘Postpone expelling Rozhkov. Send Rozhkov to Pskov. At the first sign of any hostile activity from him, expel him from the country.’17But he did not lose track of the one-time acquaintance who had shown such perspicacity about the economy. Six weeks later he wrote to Zinoviev, the Petrograd Party chief: ‘Is Rozhkov in [Petrograd]? He has to be deported.’18 Lenin’s assault on the intelligentsia was directed not against their ideas, but against them personally.
Certainly, there were many good reasons for calling Lenin a genius. He had a powerful and tough intellect, vast willpower, the ability to make sharp changes of policy, and an infinite capacity to focus on the achievement of his goal. After he returned to Russia from Switzerland in April 1917, these qualities quickly put him ahead of all the other politicians. By sheer force of will he could convince his opponents, and crush them if need be. No one was able to beat him in face-to-face argument. But if he sensed that he might be wrong, or that his position was shaky, he would withdraw from the spoken word and resort to print. It is a clear sign of Lenin’s leadership that although he was Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Sovnarkom, he held no office in the Bolshevik Party; yet in the Politburo, which was effectively the supreme political body, he was implicitly regarded as chief. He was recognized as leader, and as...
