But this does downgrade Russia’s other option – liberalism or pluralism. As Pasternak put it, in the 1880s came ‘the birth of an enlightened and affluent middle class, open to Occidental influences, progressive, intelligent, artistic’.33 There are many historical and modern examples of this more ‘Western’ style of thought in Russia, deep-set, and though often disenchanted continuing to present a more viable and civilised future. Today’s Russia is not totalitarian. The Terror is not denied. The economy is viable. But one can have ‘reform’ without liberalism – as with Peter the Great and Pyotr Stolypin. Above all we are still far from the rule of law – much more important than ‘democracy'. As elsewhere, the problem seems to be to free the idea of the ‘nation’ from both archaic barbarism and from the more recently bankrupted verbalisms that have partly melded into it. To turn inwards, outwards and upwards?
12
Except to that degree I have scarcely covered the specific mindsets, or motivations, behind the terror.
The Western sentimentalisation of the Soviet order was to a large extent overcome in the past half-century, at least as far as the Stalin period is concerned. But it is still maintained that he perverted Bolshevism – not merely that Stalin was worse than Lenin (not in itself much of a humanitarian criterion) but even that Lenin and Leninism are to some extent admirable. Without going deeply into this, one may adduce a few fundamental points.
First, of course, is the basic Marxist theory of history driven by economic class struggle – but in particular Lenin’s version in What is to be Done?, with its addition that the proletariat, in itself lacking the capacity, needed a professional, paid, ideologically trained, full-time leadership. But his most lasting, and worldwide contribution – the principle on which the Party was to be organised – is ‘Democratic Centralism’. For this meant that once a decision on action, or abstract belief, was taken by the leadership, all members had to accept it. With it went Lenin’s clearly stated ruling that any act, however immoral by bourgeois standards, was justifiable if helping the ‘Party’. Taken into the basic rules of his Comintern, it discouraged even the half-open mind. And in non-Soviet Communist parties it meant infiltrating and taking over any independent group. One result was that Ernest Bevin, head of the large and powerful Transport and General Workers Union in Britain, a prime target for fierce CPGB intrigue, was able to complain, when Foreign Secretary in the Labour government, that Molotov was behaving just like a Communist. A similar lesson seems to have been learned by Ronald Reagan from experience in Hollywood.
Utopian activism is nothing new in history. Norman Cohn, in his classic study of apocalyptic movements in medieval and post-medieval Europe, writes of their seeking a future of ‘unanimity’ and that in modern totalitarians ‘the crudeness and narrowness of this thinking strikingly recalls the prophetae of medieval Europe’. He sees these as ‘a true prototype of a modern totalitarian party; a restlessly dynamic and utterly ruthless group which, obsessed by the apocalyptic phantasy and filled with the conviction of its own infallibility, set itself infinitely above the rest of humanity and recognised no claims save that of its own supposed mission’, concerned with ‘bringing history to its preordained consummation’. And ‘for all their exploitation of the most modern technology Communism and Nazism have been inspired by phantasies which are downright archaic’. Indeed, Cohn sees Western misunderstanding of Communism as due to ignoring, or forgetting, our own earlier history.34
Lenin, it should hardly need adding, suppressed all non-Bolshevik parties (and all moderate tendencies with the Bolshevik Party) and, as far as possible, all independent thought. The revolutionary heroine Rosa Luxemburg had always rejected Lenin’s organisational methods as turning the Party into ‘an automation’. After the October Revolution she took issue in 1918 with the Soviet suppression of freedom of discussion as ruinous to socialism, and tending not merely to stupefaction but inevitably bound to cause ‘a brutalisation of public life …’35 Above all in the ruling caste, though also to a great extent with society as a whole, the narrow ideological criteria produced what has long been diagnosed in Moscow as ‘negative selection’.
As to ‘terror’ itself, we can compare the views of Engels and of Lenin on the 1793 Reign of Terror in France. Lenin wrote of ‘that genuine, popular, truly regenerative terror for which the Great French Revolution became famous’.36 Engels, on the other hand, wrote (in a letter to Marx, 4 September 1870), ‘Terror consists mostly of useless cruelties perpetrated by frightened people in order to reassure themselves. I am convinced that the blame for the Reign of Terror in 1793 lies almost exclusively with the over-nervous bourgeois, demeaning himself as a patriot, the small petty bourgeois crapping their pants with fright and the mob of riff-raff who know how to profit from the terror.’37
So Marxism in itself did not insist on terror. Indeed, Lenin’s ‘terror’ outlook seems to have come from the earlier Russian fanatics. He was a revolutionary, following Chernyshevsky, before he became a Marxist. One element in his specifically Russian background was, of course, the absence of experience of real politics to be found everywhere – reminding one of de Toqueville’s analysis of eighteenth-century France, where writers and theorists, left out of the polity, fell into violent messianisms.
There should be no need to describe the repression that followed the Bolshevik seizure of power, culminating in the openly designated ‘Red Terror’ – with Lenin personally ordering the killing of local groups of class-enemy hostages. Lenin documents kept secret for seventy-odd years, on the grounds that they did not fit his image, are full of calls to hang such. Bertrand Russell writes, when he met Lenin, ‘His guffaw at the thought of those massacred made my blood run cold.’
It is in Lenin’s time too that we see the first Bolshevik ‘show trial’ (recalling that of Danton in 1793). This was that of the Social Revolutionaries (1922) when Lenin was enraged at a compromise reached with the Second International not to use the death penalty.
Though dropped in the present volume the 1968 edition of The Great Terror, had an eight-page Appendix on the other show trials that preceded those of 1936–8. In 1928 came the Shakhty Trial (followed by the Menshevik Trial in 1931 and the Metrovick Trial in 1933). The first of these was very indicative – a total frame-up of engineers, for sabotage (though opposed by some of the Communist leadership). When it comes to collectivisation, Molotov comments ‘they say that Lenin would have carried out collectivisation without so many victims. But how could it have been carried out otherwise?’38 He adds that Lenin would probably have done it even earlier, that he was ‘sterner’ than Stalin and had often decided on ‘extreme measures’ while ‘rebuking Stalin for softness and liberalism’. At any rate, ‘kulak’ in the absence of any surviving bourgeoisie, remained a plausible object of attack right through the 1930s.
It is true that much of the veteran membership felt that the regime, committed to the crushing of the peasantry and facing the ensuing crisis, could survive only by holding firm under the accepted leadership. But the whole Marxist-Leninist vocabulary or credo combined such justifications with at least some appearance of civilised conduct, as presented on the world stage.
One remarkable example of an attempt to present hardly defensible actions as humane, in order to give a suitable impression to Westerners, was when Stalin gave the French progressive, and usefully pro-Soviet, writer Romain Rolland his reasons for bringing in the published law of 7 April 1935, extending the death penalty down to twelve-year-olds (which had had a bad press in France). Their conversation was recorded, but with a note that it was not to be published without Stalin’s permission, which it never got. Stalin’s barely credible defence of the law was