Headed for The Dustheap

By Otto Friedrich

"This music makes me want to speak sweet nonsense and pat on the head people who can create such beauty while living in this filthy hell. Nowadays we can't pat heads. We've got to hit heads, hit them without mercy."

-- Lenin, on listening to Beethoven

The first Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party, later to become the Communist Party, consisted of just nine delegates representing four labor unions, a workers' newspaper and the Jewish Social Democratic Bund. The nine delegates met in Minsk on the first three days of March 1898, proclaimed themselves a party, called for the overthrow of the Romanov rulers and then returned to their homes, where eight of the nine were promptly arrested. The fact that the heirs of this absurd little group actually did overthrow the Russian government not 22 years later was due largely to the malign genius of one man who wasn't even present at the Minsk meeting: Vladimir Ulyanov, who called himself Lenin (also at various times Meyer, Richter and Jordanov).

Son of a highly cultured schoolteacher, Lenin was expelled from school for taking part in a student protest. While idling at home, he discovered the works of Karl Marx, which prophesied the inevitable collapse of capitalism and its empires. He did finally get a law degree, but his fascination with Marxism led him to Switzerland, to an encounter with the exiled Georgi Plekhanov, the eminence grise of Russian Marxism; then to meetings with other radicals in Paris and Berlin; then, on his return home, to arrest, trial, jail and exile in Siberia. So Lenin was far away when the Social Democratic Party was born in Minsk and then nearly destroyed. But when he emerged from Siberia in 1900, he once again joined forces with Plekhanov and vowed to start a newspaper that would organize a rebirth of the Social Democrats beyond the reach of the Czar's police. Lenin's newspaper, Iskra (Spark), appeared in Munich at the end of that year, and a second meeting of the party opened in Brussels in 1903.

The tiny party immediately divided. Lenin was determined that it should remain small, highly disciplined and "as conspiratorial as possible." It must be the "vanguard of the working class" but no more than a vanguard. Lenin's more open-minded opponents wanted to take in any and all supporters, find partners and make coalitions. Lenin, as usual, insisted on getting his way, and he got it. With their majority, the Leninists took the name of Bolshevik, after bolshoi, big. The smaller group was called Mensheviks (minority).

This split in revolutionary strategies lasted for decades, and though the Bolsheviks claimed a majority, they were often outvoted within the party. Plekhanov tended to side with the Mensheviks, and so did an obstreperously brilliant newcomer named Lev Bronstein, who signed his fiery pamphlets with the name Trotsky. Lenin fought ruthlessly for control. He denounced his opponents as not Social Democrats but "Social Chauvinists," as "puerile," as "windbags"; after he lost a vote, he would accuse the winners of spiritless "parliamentarianism." When the Russian workers rose up in the largely spontaneous revolt of 1905, it was Trotsky, still only 25, who headed St. Petersburg's first soviet of workers and temporarily seized power in its name; when the Czar's soldiers crushed the revolt, Trotsky was sent to Siberia (he soon escaped on a hijacked sleigh). Lenin remained in Geneva, planning, maneuvering. In 1912 he finally had the strength to expel all the Mensheviks from his party.

It was World War I, which the exiled Lenin fervently opposed, that finally brought him to the threshold of victory. Battered by German triumphs, disheartened by bread riots and other signs of popular hostility, Czar Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917 and handed over power to a provisional government headed by the conservative Prince Lvov. Lenin passionately argued that the time for revolution was now.

Lenin could hardly lead a revolution from exile in Geneva, of course, but when he asked Berlin for permission to travel home through Germany, the Germans happily agreed to provide him with a sealed railway carriage (rather like a container for a deadly bacillus) and even allocated secret funds to aid his plans to stop the war. And so, after ten more years of exile, Lenin finally arrived by train at the Finland Station in Petrograd on April 16, 1917. He climbed onto an armored car and began making a speech. "The people need peace. The people need bread. The people need land," he cried. "And they give you war, hunger, no bread . . . We must fight for the social revolution."

When rioting broke out in July, Prince Lvov banned the Bolsheviks (who grew fourfold, to hundreds of thousands, in 1917), sent Lenin into hiding and % arrested Trotsky (newly arrived from New York City and newly allied with Lenin). Lvov then resigned in favor of his War Minister, Alexander Kerensky, who called in troops to maintain order in the capital and shut down Bolshevik newspapers. Trotsky, out of jail again, mobilized Red Guards to defend the Petrograd soviet, which he now headed. The government troops would not fight. Lenin called for an armed uprising. Almost without opposition, the Bolsheviks seized government buildings, electric plants, the post office and finally the Winter Palace, where Kerensky's Cabinet had taken refuge.

The next day, Nov. 8, Lenin appeared before the Congress of Soviets, rejected all talk of a socialist coalition government and insisted on an all- Bolshevik Cabinet. He became Premier, with Trotsky as Foreign Minister. This was not because the Bolsheviks were the biggest or most popular party. In elections for a constituent assembly, they won only 25% of the votes, in contrast to about 62% for various moderate socialist groups, notably the peasant-backed Socialist Revolutionaries, and 13% for various bourgeois parties. Dismissing that as a "formal, juridical" matter, Lenin simply disbanded the constituent assembly after one meeting. And in 1918 he banned all parties other than his own, which he had renamed the Communist Party.

In taking such high-handed actions, Lenin now had the weapon of a new police force known as the Cheka, which authorized local soviets to "arrest and shoot immediately" all members of "counterrevolutiona ry organizations." When a Socialist Revolutionary named Fanny Kaplan shot Lenin in the neck, the Cheka rounded up and executed 500 of her party comrades in one night. Lenin's view: "We have never renounced and cannot renounce terror." As for the future role of the Communists, the Eighth Party Congress decreed in 1919 that "the Russian Communist Party should master for itself undivided political supremacy in the soviets and practical supervision over all their work."

But governing a disintegrating nation was difficult. Although Trotsky made peace with the Germans in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Berlin's price was the separation from Russia of Poland, the Baltic states and the Ukraine. British and French troops landed in Murmansk to keep Russian supplies out of German hands. Various anti-Bolshevik "White" armies sprang up in the south and in Siberia. Japanese and American troops landed in Vladivostok.

By the time all those forces were pushed back or negotiated away, the Soviets' hastily nationalized and collectivized economy was a shambles. By 1920 industrial production had dropped to about 15% of the prewar level; runaway inflation had made the ruble nearly worthless; foreign trade had plummeted to almost zero. Peasants whose crops were requisitioned for the cities began hiding their harvests or not harvesting at all, and in 1921 famine killed uncounted millions.

Confronted with this disaster, Lenin zigzagged. According to the New Economic Policy inaugurated in 1921, private enterprise was once again permitted, farmers could keep or sell more of their crops, overtime pay was restored, a new state bank reformed the currency (sound familiar?). Predictably enough, improvements soon followed -- production up, trade up. But in this ambiguous moment of success, Lenin suffered a stroke. He struggled to stay at his post, to finish his work, but two more strokes increasingly paralyzed him, and after 22 months of decline, he died in 1924, at only 53.

He left a party deeply divided over the New Economic Policy, which Trotsky and others criticized as a return to capitalism, and over its whole future. Many considered Trotsky the natural heir. But Lenin unfortunately left the party machinery in the hands of a General Secretary even more ruthless than he had been. Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, who had adopted the nom de guerre of Stalin (meaning steel), was a Georgian, a onetime seminarian. He had made himself particularly useful by staging several armed robberies to replenish the Bolshevik party treasury. He was smart, tough and a master of intrigue.

In his political testament, Lenin had urged his heirs to "remove Stalin" on the grounds that he was rude and abused his power. Stalin shrewdly formed an alliance with two of Lenin's oldest comrades, Gregori Zinoviev, who was then chief of the non-Russian Communist parties assembled in the Comintern, and Lev Kamenev, a Politburo member. This triumvirate controlled enough votes to block Trotsky and keep Stalin at the party helm.

After defeating Trotsky, Stalin broke with his allies and joined forces with the more conservative leaders Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei Rykov. In the late 1920s he drove Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev out of the party, then turned against Bukharin and Rykov too. By 1929, without ever having held any government post, he was master of all he surveyed. He ordered a relentless program of forced industrialization and collective farming, a program that cost millions of lives. Trotsky fled into exile.

In 1936, as the uncrowned Czar of all the Russias, Stalin drew up a new constitution that described the Communist Party, which always remained an elite, never enrolling more than 10% of the adult population, as "the leading core of all organizations . . . both public and state." Between 1939 and 1952, however, Stalin held no party congresses. He preferred to run things by himself, as demonstrated in the great purge trials of 1936-38.

Lenin believed in purges, but he had never attempted anything on this scale. Before a fascinated and rather horrified world, one broken old Bolshevik after another stood up in court and confessed to myriad forms of treason, corruption and sabotage. Almost 50 of them were sentenced to death, including Zinoviev, Rykov and Secret Police Chief G.G. Yagoda. Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, one of the heroes of the civil war, was sent to a firing squad, along with seven other generals. Many others died in secret. And as a kind of horrid climax to the purge, a Soviet agent befriended Trotsky in Mexico City, then hacked him to death in 1940 with a steel-bladed alpenstock.

Despite such crimes, this was a period of great growth and strength for the Communist Party all around the world. In a time of global depression and the sinister rise of fascism, many people regarded both capitalism and democracy as doomed and Communism as the wave of the future. Precisely because it was militant and authoritarian and claimed to have all the answers, Communism attracted people as diverse as Andre Malraux, Paul Robeson, Bertolt Brecht. Their allegiance took a severe beating when Stalin negotiated an alliance with Hitler that enabled the Nazis to start World War II in 1939. But when Hitler invaded Russia in 1941, the Soviets suddenly became admired members of the Western alliance.

When Stalin died in 1953, he was far gone in paranoia, convinced that a cabal of Jewish doctors was trying to poison him. Only after shooting Stalin's reptilian police chief, Lavrenty Beria, did the Kremlin survivors, notably the new Communist Party Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, try to shift to a new policy known as "the thaw." In a four-hour speech before the 20th Party Congress, supposedly secret but widely leaked, Khrushchev described to the faithful for the first time the full range of Stalin's crimes. ("But where were you during all those years?" one listener asked Khrushchev, according to a joke at the , time. "Who said that?" shouted Khrushchev, who had been one of Stalin's commissars in the Ukraine. Silence. "That's where I was," said Khrushchev.)

That same year, 1956, the thaw melted too quickly as far as the Kremlin was concerned. Polish crowds demonstrated to demand a change of leadership. The Hungarians even overthrew their government and enjoyed one heady week of independence. Then Khrushchev sent in Soviet tanks to restore the old order. When he was forced out in 1964, Leonid Brezhnev seemed even more determined to maintain that old order forever, sending more tanks to suppress Czech independence in 1968 and warning that he would do so again whenever necessary. He too proclaimed a new constitution in 1977, declaring more strongly than ever that the Communist Party was "the leading and guiding force of Soviet society."

It sometimes seemed that the tank-backed Communist Party monolith was now immovable, impenetrable, even immortal. But Brezhnev died, and so did his two successors, and the unthinkable idea of Communists actually surrendering power slowly began to become thinkable.

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