As the three talked near the car, Stalin was seized with doubts: ‘I promised to do it in order to calm him, but what if he interprets my words as meaning that things really are hopeless?’ So it was decided that Stalin would return and reassure Lenin that the doctors were optimistic, that Lenin would recover, and that the time to fulfil his request had not yet arrived. Lenin agreed, although as Stalin left Lenin said to him, ‘are you playing games with me? [Lukavil?]’. Stalin answered, ‘when have you ever seen me play games with you?’16
And in fact Lenin did improve, though several months passed before he was even allowed visitors. In August and September he was receiving political visits at Gorki and preparing for a return to work, which he did on 2 October. For the rest of the autumn months Lenin worked at a fairly intense pace. During this period he had disagreements with various Politburo members, including Stalin and Trotsky, but these disagreements were settled without disrupting the usual working relationships.
In late November Lenin evidently sensed that the end was rapidly approaching and that the time had come to bequeath a final statement to the party. He therefore asked to be sent a copy of the ‘Political Testament’ of Friedrich Engels.17 On 15 December 1922 Lenin had his second stroke. He could no longer write legibly and could only communicate orally or by means of dictation (a procedure he strongly disliked). On the eve of this stroke he had already begun to ‘liquidate’ his various ongoing files and to dispose of the books in his personal library. Books on agriculture went to his sister Maria, books on education, scientific organization of labour and production propaganda went to Krupskaya, belles-lettres were to be held until needed, while he reserved for himself political writings, memoirs and biographies.18 Cut off from current affairs, restricted to a few minutes of dictation a day, Lenin could influence affairs only by writing a few final articles.
Lenin’s writings in the period December 1922 to March 1923 consist not only of articles published at the time but of various secret dictations that only came to light later. The precise intention of these secret writings is very difficult to assess and has given rise to long-standing controversies. Unfortunately, these controversies have deflected attention from the content of the articles that we know Lenin wanted to be published. These final articles contain Lenin’s last thoughts on the three vulnerable points of his heroic scenario – international revolution, peasant support for socialist transformation, and remaking the state apparatus – and as such they arise organically out of the shift in outlook that began in 1919. In order to bring this out I will pass over the issue of Lenin’s secret writings and examine his reaction to the three challenges, starting in 1919 and continuing on to early 1923.
Holding Out
Lenin’s happy confidence in early 1919 about international revolution comes out in an interview conducted by the sympathetic Arthur Ransome. Ransome reported that Lenin ‘was entirely convinced that England was on the eve of revolution, and pooh-poohed my objections… “Strikes and Soviets. If these two habits once get hold, nothing will keep the workmen from them. And Soviets, once started, must sooner or later come to supreme power”.’19 When Ransome stated that he did not believe there would be a revolution in Britain, Lenin responded:
We have a saying that a man may have typhoid while still on his legs. Twenty, maybe thirty years ago I had abortive typhoid, and was going about with it, had had it some days before it knocked me over. Well, England and France and Italy have caught the disease already. England may seem to you to be untouched, but the microbe is already there.20
A year later, Lenin had talk with another visiting Englishman, Bertrand Russell, and was distinctly less sanguine. He outlined to Russell the strategy he wanted British Communists to adopt: support the election of a Labour government in the hopes that its inaction would radicalize the masses – a strategy obviously extrapolated from his own experience in 1917. When Russell opined that ‘whatever is possible in England can be achieved without bloodshed, [Lenin] waved aside the suggestion as fantastic’. Nevertheless, Lenin ‘admitted that there is little chance of revolution in England now, and that the working man is not yet disgusted with Parliamentary Government’.21
The delay in international revolution forced Lenin to be more cautious in his predictions of ‘steps toward socialism’ at home. In early 1919, despite the huge challenges that threatened the survival of the Bolshevik government, Lenin could still assure his audiences that ‘this is the last difficult half-year’ because ‘the international situation has never been so good’.22 He was particularly cheered by the revolution that broke out in Hungary in March 1919. As a ‘more cultured country’ than Russia, Hungary would show the socialist revolution in a better light, ‘without the violence, without the bloodshed that was forced upon us by the Kerenskys and the imperialists’.23
Lenin’s optimism could not be sustained. The defeat of the Hungarian revolution in August 1919 marks a turning-point in his rhetoric about international revolution. By early 1921, on the eve of NEP, he dolefully noted that the West European workers had failed to take advantage of the opportunity to ‘have done with the capitalists at one stroke’. As a result, ‘our main difficulties over the past four years have been due to the fact that the West European capitalists managed to bring the war to an end and stave off revolution’.24 Lenin accordingly adjusted his scenario in a number of ways. One method was to lower the definition of success. Yes, the Bolsheviks may have been over-sanguine about receiving ‘swift and direct support’ from the European proletariat, but they had managed to survive and this meant that they had been ‘correct on the most fundamental issues’:
When we ask ourselves how this could have happened, how it could be that a state, undoubtedly one of the most backward and weakest, managed to repel the attacks of the openly hostile, most powerful countries in the world, when we try to examine this question, we see clearly that it was because we proved to be correct on the most fundamental issues. Our forecasts and calculations proved to be correct. It turned out that although we did not receive the swift and direct support of the working people of the world that we had counted on, and which we had regarded as the basis of the whole of our policy, we did receive support of another kind, which was not direct or swift, namely, the sympathy of the labouring masses – the workers and the peasants, the masses in the countryside – throughout the world, even in those states that are most hostile to us.25
Despite the absence of actual revolution Lenin insisted that the Soviet system remained an inspirational model to the exploited people of the world. He even boasted that Soviet Russia was winning support from capitalists – specifically, the capitalists of the small countries bordering Russia who signed trade treaties with the Bolsheviks despite pressure from the victorious great powers.26