In what follows we focus on Lenin’s personal evolution. Lenin had been very explicit about the Marxist justification for undertaking a socialist revolution in backward Russia. Abroad, the Russian revolution would spark off revolutions in more advanced countries. At home, the workers had moved beyond the alliance with the peasantry as a whole. Since they were now allied solely with the exploited labourers in the villages, they were free to move on from a merely democratic revolution to the socialist revolution. Lenin was equally insistent that ‘soviet democracy’ had the mission of utterly remaking the state apparatus by cleansing it of ‘bureaucratism’. He was therefore profoundly disappointed when he was forced to realize that these things were not happening – not in the short term, nor even in the medium term. Like a cartoon character who keeps walking in midair even though he has left the cliff behind, Lenin no longer had the solid basis of his original scenario to support his journey. He had to come up with an explanation of why Russia’s socialist revolution was not doomed to crash to the ground.
All through his life Lenin had always stressed the continuity of his views. He argued that the 1905 revolution vindicated the pre-revolutionary Iskra platform, that his wartime Left Zimmerwald platform did not deviate from Kautsky-when-he-was-a-Marxist, and that the October revolution had orthodox Marxist credentials. From 1919 he was forced to admit that some basic Bolshevik assumptions had not yet been vindicated, yet true to his life-long habit he minimized the extent of the necessary modifications. In the 1923 article quoted above, he characterized his changes to the ‘textbook à la Kautsky’ as ‘certain amendments (quite insignificant from the stand point of the general development of world history)… certain distinguishing features… certain partial innovations… somewhat unusual conditions… such details of development (from the standpoint of world history they were certainly details) as the Brest-Litovsk peace, the New Economic Policy, and so forth’.2
To understand the adjustments that Lenin was forced to make to his heroic scenario, we need to take a look at some of these ‘details of development’ that may have been small in the scale of world history but that loomed large in the scale of the few years remaining to Lenin.
The Challenge of Events
From many points of view Bolshevik survival was a miracle and Lenin felt that, no matter what else was urged against Bolshevism, the survival of the proletarian vlast was a bottom-line justification for the great deed of October 1917. Yet he could not hide from himself that some fundamental expectations had not been met.
Between 1918 and 1922 there were so many challenges to Bolshevik rule that it is perhaps better to speak of ‘civil wars’ in the plural. The Whites, who relied principally on the elite classes of tsarist Russia, were led by former officers such as Admiral Kolchak in Siberia and General Denikin in south Russia. Peasant rebels, collectively called the Greens, mounted a series of revolts both local and large-scale. National minorities in the border regions also took advantage of the temporary breakdown of central authority to declare independence. Some were successful (Poland, Finland, Baltic states); others were reincorporated into Soviet Russia. Finally, foreign powers such as France, the United States and Japan intervened in the hope of toppling Bolshevism.
Given the many challenges to its existence, the most crucial accomplishment of the new government was the creation of the Red Army out of the ruins of the old Imperial army. The Red Army was a most improbable institution. The Bolsheviks – a radical working-class party that strongly opposed militarism and preached defeatism before the revolution – not only had to turn themselves into military commanders but also had to work together with tsarist military officers and peasant recruits in order to build an effective fighting machine.
In the vivid phrase of eyewitness Arthur Ransome, the Bolsheviks had ‘illusion after illusion scraped from them by the pumice-stone of experience’.3 Informed outsiders, each writing before the introduction of NEP in 1921, detailed the failure of Lenin’s three basic justifications during this period. The American socialist Morris Hillquit detailed the disappointing record of international revolution:
Only when the Sparticide risings in Germany were quelled [in early 1919] and the Hungarian Soviet government was overthrown [in mid-1919]; when the great struggle in the Italian metal industry was settled by mutual concessions, and the oft-announced general strikes in England systematically failed to materialize; when the spirit of unrest and rebellion engendered by the war and the Versailles ‘settlement’ was succeeded by a state of sullen apathy, and the capitalist world settled down to a spell of heavy political reaction, only then did the Communists begin to lose faith in an imminent world revolution.4
Socialist transformation in the countryside also came up short. As émigré Russian economist Leo Pasvolsky drily observed about hopes for a significant movement toward collective agricultural production, the Bolsheviks ‘made attempts to produce new agrarian forms, but they did not expect any great success out of them and did not achieve any success’.5 Pasvolsky was no doubt correct about the expectations of the Bolsheviks in general, but Lenin himself had started off with more sanguine hopes about what could be accomplished during and even because of the wartime economic emergency.
William Walling (the American socialist whose interview with Lenin after the 1905 revolution was quoted in chapter Three) was equally dismissive about Bolshevik attempts to remake the state apparatus when he derided ‘the inability of a party consisting almost wholly of agitators, propagandists and self-appointed shepherds of the proletariat to furnish any administrative, technical or constructive talents’.6
All three of these contemporaneous observers were hostile to Bolshevism. Yet, as we shall see, Lenin did not deny these disappointments and indeed, in certain moods, could be even more scathing about them.
In early 1921, when the Bolsheviks introduced the New Economic Policy or NEP, the Soviet government carried out a series of dramatic reversals of economic policy. Private trade in grain was legalized or, perhaps better, decriminalized, while state industry was forced to work for the market and to adopt ‘capitalist’ methods. These changes roughly coincided with the end of hostilities, the signing of peace and trade treaties and the consequent demobilization of the Red Army. The dramatic introduction of NEP has also created a tendency to see the year 1921 as the end of the Russian’s prolonged time of troubles. But in many respects the real year of transition was 1922, a time when Russia finally emerged from the long years of collapse and breakdown and the Bolshevik party stopped reeling from the rapid changes resulting from the introduction and then the unplanned extension of NEP in 1921. A closer look at 1922 will give us a better idea of the context of Lenin’s final evolution.
After years of economic degradation a drought in 1921 set off an intense famine that provided the climax to the horror and devastation of the civil war. Russia could hardly have coped with this famine without the benign intervention of foreign aid, particularly by the American Relief Agency (ARA). At the beginning of 1922 the country was still completely in the grip of this famine. By the end of the year the worst was over and the country was beginning to revive. The change can be traced in a small book appropriately entitled Plague, Pestilence and Famine. It consists of letters from a British nurse, Muriel Payne, who spent March–September 1922 in the famine region along the Volga. At the beginning of the book, Payne is confronted with something out of Dante’s Inferno: