WHAT COMMUNIST CONGRESSES HAVE DONE

The past congresses of the Russian Communist Party check off the stages by which an underground gang of amateur conspirators became a world-powerful gang of ruthless professionals.

Conspiracy. Lenin, in a Czarist political prison, dreamed up the First Congress. Out of his cell, the little father of Soviet Russia smuggled a program for a new Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party. Only nine delegates managed to get past the police and mutter hurriedly for three days at Minsk in 1898. They just had time to draft a manifesto before the police caught up with them.

The next four congresses, all convened outside of Russia, saw the Bolsheviks wiggle into absolute control of the party. Lenin, who got out of Siberia in 1900, won the argument for armed rebellion. '"The Congress," he insisted, "must be ... a council to organize war." The name of Joseph Stalin began to appear in the minutes.

Revolution. The Seventh Congress (Petrograd, 1918), held five months after the Revolution, was the first open-air assembly of the triumphant party. It put "Communist" into the party's title (in full: "Russian Communist Party of Bolsheviks"). This meeting, and the next three, set up these revolutionary milestones: 1) the Red army; 2) the "New Economic Policy," a temporary retreat from state ownership of industry and trade, permitting some private enterprise; 3) the Comintern, Communism's international arm.

The last congress Lenin went to (he died in 1924) was the Eleventh, which set up the powerful office of general secretary, designed to watchdog the party machinery. Stalin got the job. The ailing Lenin had his misgivings. "This cook," he said of Stalin, "can only serve peppery dishes."

The peppery sauce that Stalin favored became apparent in the next four congresses (1923-25): the base of the recipe was blood. "You will run into a wall against which you will smash your head," Stalin warned his rivals.

Stalinism. By the 18th Congress Stalin was cooking with gas, and the smell of blood pudding was all through the kitchen. Everyone in Russia had had a bellyful. A new slogan was shouted: "Stalin is the Lenin of Today!"

Stalin was in. He used the 16th Congress (1930) to speed up the First Five-Year Plan, announced at the previous congress. The 17th Congress (1934) gauged the brutal success of enforced collectivization, which cost millions of peasants their lives, and the emergence of Russia (by Stalin's verbal bookkeeping) from "an agrarian country" into "an industrial country."

The 18th Congress (1939), on the eve of World War II, laid down a new zig in Russia's zigzag foreign policy. Stalin denounced the Western democracies for "urging Germany on to march farther East." Thus he foreshadowed his deal with the Nazis (the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August 1939), which helped unleash Hitler's invasion of Poland. Stalin told the delegates: "It is now a question of a new redivision of the world . . ."

The 19th Congress, the first in the past 13 years, will meet this week in Moscow (see above).

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