It was inevitable that Marx would be followed by a Lenin, whose observations on the tactics necessary in the Bolshevik revolution are revealing: 'We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, lawbreaking, withholding and concealing truth… We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, scorn and the like towards those who disagree with us.'
Lenin in his turn, if a communist system were to survive, could not fail to be followed by a Stalin, in a dictatorship marked by merciless repression and wholesale butchery. How many people, to help stabilize the regime, were killed under Stalin? Twenty million? Fifty million? A hundred million? Bukovsky puts it at rather more than fifty.
In the last eighty years of Tsarist rule, up to 1917, some seventeen people, in what were thought to be fairly turbulent times, had been executed every year. The Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka, in a report on their work in 1918 and 1919, recorded that in those two years more than one thousand people a month had been executed by them without trial.
But it was not moral squalor that undid Marxist-Leninism in the end. The system was not undermined by its essential fraudulence, though that was plain enough. What killed Marxist-Leninism, and destroyed Soviet Russia, was simply that the doctrine had never been, and probably never could be, realized. It did not work.
The birth of the regime, in the October Revolution of 1917, is shrouded in the myth that this was the result of a vast popular movement which swept into power the rulers of its choice. The truth is very different.
The government from which the Bolsheviks unlawfully seized power in 1917, though it was weak and unpopular, had at least come into existence constitutionally and is now recognized to have been fairly representative of the people. The promises of the minority group who by force and fraud were able to overthrow it were certainly attractive. Besides equality, liberty and fraternity, they guaranteed power to the workers, land to the peasants and peace to the people. Every one of these promises was broken. Under Bolshevism, workers were never given anything but a nominal share in government. Real power in representative bodies, the Soviets, was soon taken over by the Party, to which any show of opposition was brutally crushed. Land was, in the early stages, distributed to peasants but very soon taken away into state ownership. Most people who found their living on the land were forced into collective farms. Huge numbers of the most capable and hard-working were physically eliminated. Solzhenitsyn's researches showed him that fifteen million peasants were transported to extermination in the two years 1929 and 1930 alone. As for peace, quite apart from the more famous rebellions such as those in Murom, Yaroslavl, Rybinsk and Arzamas, and Antonov's, with its centre in Tambov, which were all put down with the utmost savagery, the Communist Party had embarked upon a civil war against its own population which was to continue for half a century, a war in which the dead far outnumbered those of any other war in the whole history of mankind. In place of equality, liberty and fraternity, the hallmarks of an increasingly corrupt society were coercion, fear and distrust. Words themselves seemed to have acquired new meanings in a socialist context. Equality meant no more, as we have seen, than privileges for top Party bureaucrats, with their special shops, foreign travel, high salaries and luxurious homes. There were equal rights for all others, as Bukovsky has put it, to share a common misery, to accommodate themselves to a society they knew was totally corrupt, to stand for ever in queues or else to perish in a Gulag. The total alienation this produced between Party and people brought about in time a general disillusion with socialist aspirations.
By the 1970s hope had long given way to cynicism. A continuous process of petrification seemed to have overcome the bureaucratic machine, producing economic policies and political practice as dogmatic as they were inflexible. The general atmosphere had become one of stagnation. Workers, denied any real incentive, took little interest in their work. Virtues and abilities went unrecognized and certainly, unless they were applied to meeting the state's requirements, earned no promotion. Advancement depended upon conformity. Ideology penetrated the structure of the machine at every level but those who operated it had long since shed any adherence to truly socialist principles. The Party never comprised more than 10 per cent of the population of the Soviet Union and probably not one Party member in ten in 1970 still believed in communism. The process of candidacy for membership to the Party, in which the candidate had to satisfy one Party committee after another of his devotion to the CPSU, and give proof of it, became an elaborate exercise in falsehood.
The cumulative effect of all this on the Soviet economy was by the mid-1970s disastrous. Central planning imposed restrictions on local initiative in situations ill understood at the controlling centre. Local needs, in materials, equipment, spare parts, even roads, were either not known or disregarded. People in the localities made their own arrangements for some fictitious show of meeting planned targets.
The targets, constantly derided by the populace, always rose and were almost never met. Workers anxious to meet them, where any did, faced only the hostility of workmates. Low salaries and shortages stimulated theft. Factories and shops, if unwillingly, fed the black market, under which 30 per cent of the whole of the country's economy by 1983 was operating.
Peasants cultivated their own plots for subsistence, selling any surplus on the black market for the cash they needed. In 1981 it was calculated that these plots — 3 per cent of the totality of arable land — were producing half of all the agricultural output. State investment in the early 1980s to enable peasants to earn more money only resulted in their producing from the land what they themselves needed for their own purposes. Parts of the Soviet Union were in fact, in the early 1980s, approaching starvation. Only a loosening of control could correct this tendency but that would lead, as it had in Hungary, in the direction of a free market economy, which was a trend the system could not tolerate.
By 1985 the growth rate of GNP in the USSR was negative, with a positive growth rate in the population, by far the greater part of the increase being in non-Russian peoples. Pauperization was now a great and growing menace. Inflation, already high and always rising, could no longer be concealed by official manipulation. Within the Soviet Union more and more people were turning to religion, often in forms the state found sufficiently hostile to proscribe. The weaknesses built into the system from the start were beginning to destroy it.
The events of the August war in 1985 worked in two ways to bring matters to a head. The political leadership had long been discredited by developments in Poland. It was the first time a governing European Communist Party had been shown to be unable to cope with dissidence and ideological opposition. Moscow was faced with the choice between direct intervention by Red Army troops and the takeover of Polish security by the Soviet KGB, or recourse to Polish military government. The latter, chosen through old men's inertia rather than conscious decision, put off for a time the international outcry which Soviet military action would have caused, and partially evaded Soviet responsibility for Poland's debt. But it signalled the abdication of the Communist Party of Poland from the control of political life.