The reason Lenin could so easily tack back and forth between invoking references to the “common man” and his own elite-oriented program lay in the concept of the “Soviet man,” a new person engineered entirely by the state. Any and all destruction of living, breathing people was sanctioned and even desirable, for the quicker the “old” man was eradicated, the sooner the new Soviet man could emerge. Practically, Lenin’s logic led to the Red Terror. Like Hitler’s Germany and the Stalinist successor state, Lenin’s revolutionary agenda could not have been implemented without the vicious application of force. Over time, the millions of people killed tended to be forgotten as a statistic, but Lenin had an obsession with murder in the name of politics. “How can you make a revolution without firing squads?” he asked, despite the fact that the Americans had pulled it off quite nicely just a century earlier.158 “If you can’t shoot a…saboteur,” he asked, “what sort of great revolution is it?”159 As British historian Paul Johnson has noted:
[Lenin’s] writings abound in military metaphors: states of siege, iron rings, sheets of steel, marching, camps, barricades, forts, offensives, mobile units, guerilla warfare, firing squads. They are dominated by violently activist verbs: flame, leap, ignite, goad, shoot, shake, seize, attack, blaze, repel, weld, compel, purge, exterminate.160
To crush the kulaks he urged the Bolsheviks to “Hang (and I mean hang so that the people can see) not less than 100 known bloodsuckers.”161 Lenin issued a similar set of orders in August 1918. One Communist paper boasted that “we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood.”162
Before Lenin could “kill” or “drown” anyone, he had to have control of the Russian government. But in February 1917, a series of strikes and demonstrations in Petrograd initiated the first Russian revolution. Troops called out to quell the demonstrations—many of them untrained or unreliable reserves not sent to the front—refused to fire on the crowds. Some mutinied; officers went into hiding; and the Czar’s ability to stem the tide of protest vanished. When the Czar traveled to Petrograd to personally intervene, he found military and civilian officials aligned against him, and was persuaded to abdicate. On March 15, he stepped down, and six days later he was placed under house arrest. (In July 1918 the Czar and his entire family would be executed at a holding house in Yekaterinburg.) A provisional government took control, led by the brilliant orator and member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party Aleksandr Kerensky. A member of the Duma’s Provisional Committee and vice chairman of the Petrograd Soviet (that is, “workers’ council”), Kerensky was appointed minister of war in May 1917, but he could not marginalize or neutralize the Bolsheviks, particularly after Lenin arrived in April. When Kerensky allowed the war to drag on, Lenin had his chance to lead the resistance, not just be its visionary, although the takeover of the Winter Palace was led by Trotsky in October.
The Bolsheviks’ hold on power was tenuous. Not only did the monarchists and non-Socialists oppose them, but other groups on the Left struggled to grab power, and Kerensky enjoyed support in the middle of the political mix. These divisions enabled Lenin’s bloody words to attain a sort of logical status. After all, it did appear that there were “enemies” on all sides for the Bolsheviks. When fellow revolutionary Isaac Steinberg asked Lenin why he even bothered with fancy names, Steinberg said, “Let’s honestly call [the Extraordinary Commission] the Commissariat for Social Annihilation…” to which Lenin replied, “Well said!…but it can’t be stated by us.”163 Consolidating the regime required terror, but it also demanded sensible strategy, which Lenin supplied: control the rail centers at Moscow and Petrograd, and eliminate recalcitrant officials. This was easily handled by the terror squads picking off opponents one at a time, and without a constitutional system of protective law, no institutions existed in Russia to stop it. All that vanished in the Red Terror.
The Communists also benefited from two other factors. First, although badly outnumbered, they were consolidated, whereas their enemies in the civil war that followed were split among three armies that rarely coordinated. The “Whites,” the enemy of the “Reds,” led by the czarist generals, had allies in the form of the Czech Legion of upwards of 35,000 volunteers who fought on their side. But these ultimately proved unreliable, and all too often the battle was not between the Whites and the Reds but also among a dozen smaller splinter groups that muddled the battle lines. Had the Whites managed to unite, either among themselves or with the other opponents of the Bolsheviks, Lenin’s group might have been doomed.
A second factor that worked in the Bolsheviks’ favor was the public dissatisfaction with the war. In June, despite a promise to the contrary, Kerensky’s Provisional Government ordered new troop deployments to the front. Mutinies followed which Kerensky could not control. Although new demonstrations burst out, Lenin sensed it was still too early (the Bolsheviks controlled only about one in five of the delegates) and he fled to Finland while the uprising withered. Czarist general Lavr Kornilov, claiming the radicals were about to seize the Petrograd government, marched the 3rd Army into the city and asked for reinforcements—in reality plotting a coup. Kerensky relieved him of command, but not before being forced to seek help from the Bolsheviks. They called up the Red Guards, and Bolshevik agents, instead of assisting the troop movements, slowed trains and halted telegraph communications. The coup fizzled, but in the confusion, Kerensky had sent signals that his government was weak and, worse, desperate for help in stopping Kornilov, he had armed his enemies from government weapons stores. War demands also led Kerensky to alienate the peasants when the Provisional Government’s March decree requisitioned virtually all available food for the military.
By October, Lenin was convinced the time was ripe, and he returned to snatch power, forming the “Political Bureau” under Kerensky’s nose on October 9. In November, Kerensky briefly led aborted attempts to retake the major cities before fleeing to France. Once in control, the Bolsheviks immediately announced a cease-fire with Germany, which provided masses of disgruntled men ready to claim their reward for years of fruitless combat. Entire regiments had returned to the cities by October, becoming prime targets for Bolshevik recruitment. At the same time, the peasantry was drifting into the Bolshevik camp, and the government’s war-induced food shortages added to the interruption of the land redistribution program, also necessitated by the war. Once theft by the government seemed legitimized, order broke down everywhere, all to the benefit of the Bolsheviks. Resistance to government food collections grew so marked that five sixths stayed in the hands of the peasants, who hid and hoarded. On October 25, armed Bolsheviks took control at gunpoint, then forced the Congress to rubber-stamp their coup d’état.
No grandiose socialist slogans accompanied the Bolshevik seizure of Russia, no high-minded rhetoric about the good of the masses characterized the takeover. It was a quasi-military operation whose tyrannical nature was, temporarily at least, concealed by Lenin in numerous votes, appointments of “opponents” (such as the Mensheviks and Kadets) to power, and faux exercises of “democracy.” Lenin realized that by controlling the head, the body would follow, and therefore made no attempt to interfere with daily life or to publicly restructure the Congress. Instead, enemies would quietly be purged from the party—and killed. But he moved instantly to secure the real levers of power, slamming shut any newspapers that opposed him and running all news through two house organs, Pravda (“Truth”) or Izvestia (“News”). In latter years, a dark Russian proverb surfaced: “There is no Truth in the News, and no News in the Truth.” Indeed, the real truth was that Lenin was staffing the government right down to the local level with party faithful, overwhelming the people with lots of show elections. For a population utterly unfamiliar with voting and unused to genuine democratic power, the result was predictable: Lenin got his men in the right positions.
By this point, Lenin’s perpetual illnesses had returned, made worse by a series of heart attacks that increa
singly left him incapacitated. Several candidates waited to replace him, including Trotsky, but none more vicious and determined than Joseph Stalin. Born in 1878, Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, a Georgian, Stalin was beset by injury as a child, suffering from smallpox, which left him with a pockmarked face; at age twelve he suffered permanent arm damage in a pair of carriage accidents. A seminary student, Stalin was expelled when he failed to pay his tuition, whereupon he landed on the writings of Lenin. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1903, operating chiefly out of the Caucasus, where he raised money through bank robberies and kidnapping. Calling himself Koba Dzhugashvili, he was captured several times by the secret police, but repeatedly escaped, even from Siberian exile. There is strong evidence that he became a police spy or informant for the Okhrana, the Czar’s secret police, and later his Okhrana dossier became a subject of much speculation, particularly during the de-Stalinization of the USSR under Nikita Khrushchev. In 1912, Koba was in St. Petersburg when funding was obtained for the newspaper Pravda through the Okhrana, and was present when the first issue was created, largely through the efforts of another young Communist, Vyacheslav Skryabin, who took the name Molotov (Russian for “hammer”), although Koba would later attempt to take credit for the newspaper. When Koba was arrested again, he escaped once more and took the name “Stalin,” or “man of steel.”164
Lenin had watched Stalin rise through the ranks, an obedient soldier and reliable leader. He assigned both Stalin and Trotsky to the Politburo, where the two frequently clashed, although Lenin considered Trotsky a better military leader and more inspiring speaker and favored him for his status as a secular Jew. Stalin countered with three of his own supporters, Lev Kamenev, Lazar Kaganovich, and Grigory Zinoviev, and was able to whittle away at Trotsky’s support. (Only Kaganovich would later survive Stalin’s purges.)
As the first general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s Central Committee from 1922, Stalin’s alliance with Kamenev, the chairman of the executive committee, Zinoviev, full Politboro member and head of the Comintern, and Kaganovich, who was responsible for all appointments and assignments within the Communist Party bureaucracy, proved invaluable. The Party had made Stalin Lenin’s intermediary, but their relationship deteriorated and Lenin grew increasingly distrustful of the Georgian. Lenin’s letter naming Trotsky as his successor was discovered by Stalin, who, in his official capacity as “caretaker” of Lenin’s health, effectively buried the letter out of sight of the Central Committee, and Trotsky did not learn of the deception. With Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin plotted to excise two of his former allies, Kamenev and Zinoviev, who could become future rivals—as well as Trotsky—and by the end of 1926 had consolidated much of the Party’s power in his own hands, helped considerably by Kaganovich, who placed Stalin’s adherents in critical positions throughout the Party.
In late 1927, with the collapse of Soviet agriculture, Stalin overturned Lenin’s “New Economic Policy” and instituted a dramatic and deadly collectivization process that brought all agriculture under state control.165 When—as would be expected—production fell, Stalin blamed it on the kulaks (“grasping hands”), or small private farmers who owned more than eight acres per male family member and constituted less than 5 percent of the population of the USSR (which at the time included all of modern-day Siberia, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan, though not yet the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania and some of the World War II territories the Soviets would seize). Stalin virtually declared war on the kulaks, and ordered farmers rounded up, shot, deported, and stripped of their land. The kulaks retaliated by refusing to sell their crops or give up their lands, slaughtering their animals rather than taking them to market. By 1930, Stalin, convinced the Ukrainian peasants were hoarding grain, refused to release reserves that might have alleviated the forced famine. Sometimes called the Ukrainian genocide, the imposed famine in the region killed between 10 and 20 million. One study determined that yearly deportations of kulaks and middle-income peasants from 1930 to 1941 reached a peak of 1.8 million in 1931 and fell to 930,000 by 1940. Approximately three million of the deportees died in the gulag, while the remainder of the peasants died of starvation.166 Later termed the “Harvest of Sorrow,” the Communist-induced famine constituted one of the most widespread, systematic mass murders of all time.167 This reaper’s bill came on top of the nine million who died in the Russian Civil War.168
Western leftists gushed about Stalin, particularly the New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, who personally witnessed the bodies strewn along the way on his travels in the USSR and mysteriously forgot those scenes in his reporting. Perhaps the most effusive Western supporter of Stalin was George Bernard Shaw: “Jesus Christ has come down to earth,” he announced. Stalin had “delivered the goods to an extent that seemed impossible ten years ago.”169 To a Leningrad audience, he rhapsodized, “If the future is…as Lenin saw it, then we may all smile and look forward to the future without fear.” Of course, that did not apply to the millions of kulaks and “wreckers” who were terrorized on a daily basis. When the Bolsheviks abolished private property in the countryside, it produced the greatest famine in human history, all man-made. Peasants rebelled at the confiscation of their livestock and crops, burning wheat and slaughtering animals by the millions—upwards of two thirds of the sheep and goats, and close to half of all cattle. The seizure of grain left millions starving as they ate “cats, dogs, field mice, birds, tree bark and even horse manure…. There were even cases of cannibalism.”170 As starvation and murder winnowed out the peasants, the numbers (completely ignored in the West) grew to mind-boggling proportions. In 1987, Robert Conquest, then slurred as a right-wing ideologue, produced his landmark book, Harvest of Sorrow, estimating the “terror-famine,” as he called it, to have accounted for 14.5 million deaths.171 Subsequent work in the post–Cold War former Soviet archives suggests Conquest’s figures were too low. Normal population increases would have put Russia’s 1937 population at 186 million, when the census counted only 156 million. Where did the 30 million go? Depending on what years are included, the Lenin-Stalin tag-team murder combo accounted for between 20 and 40 million Russians, Ukrainians, and subjugated people dead before Hitler’s war machine ever invaded.172
Russia’s descent into a Bolshevik Hades would have worldwide repercussions for decades, rearranging the map of Europe, reordering entire populations, but most important, offering an undeniable example of the total failure of Communist theology. And a theology it had become: communism, often called “godless,” had elevated the state itself to the position of a deity. A short string of venomous dictators took turns as high priests, proving in the process how interchangeable they were. Until the curtains to the holy of holies could be pulled back, and the murderous essence of Marxism incarnate exposed, European elites and Progressives would praise the perceived accomplishments of the USSR. Hypnotized by statistics and dizzied by a surface egalitarianism that was already quickly devolving into the most medieval of aristocratic class systems, Europeans of all classes rapidly gravitated to socialism and statism, leaving an isolated America and wounded Britain nearly alone.
CHAPTER THREE
Seeking Perfection in the Postwar World
Time Line
1918: Armistice (November 11); German troops withdraw from France; Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicates; Poland “created” under Józef Piłsudski; Russian Civil War (Reds vs. Whites); Spanish flu pandemic kills 50 million worldwide
1919: Versailles Treaty signed; U.S. Prohibition Amendment ratified; U.S. lands troops in Russia to fight Reds; Polish-Soviet War; Greco-Turkish War; 1st Communist International meets; Eugene Debs imprisoned; Einstein’s Theory of Relativity confirmed; American Communist Party founded; Pope Benedict XV agrees to a Catholic political party in Italy; Sun Yat-sen rejuvenates Chung-kuo Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) in China
1920: 1st peaceful social democratic government formed (Sweden); France prohibits sale of contraceptives; Women�
��s suffrage amendment in United States; Poles defeat Red Army in Poland; Obregón assumes presidency of Mexico, ending revolution; anarchists bomb Wall Street, killing thirty-eight; Warren G. Harding elected U.S. president
1921: German reparations payments begin; end of civil war and famine in Russia leaves 10 million dead; Chinese Communist Party established; first baseball game broadcast; aircraft led by General Billy Mitchell “sink” Ostfriesland
1922: Joseph Stalin becomes general secretary of Soviet Communist Party; Benito Mussolini becomes premier of Italy; British Broadcasting System (later BBC) formed; Ottoman Empire abolished; hyperinflation in Germany begins; USSR formed; unemployment in United States nears 12 percent; Washington Naval Arms Conference
1923: Stalin assumes control of USSR; Pancho Villa assassinated in Mexico; Beer Hall Putsch by Adolf Hitler in Munich; French and Belgian troops occupy the Ruhr; German hyperinflation reaches 4.2 trillion marks to the dollar; Miguel Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship established in Spain; Warren Harding dies and Calvin Coolidge assumes presidency; Andrew Mellon tax cuts enacted
1924: Hitler imprisoned and writes Mein Kampf (published 1925); U.S. Immigration Act of 1924 and Asian Exclusion Act passed; J. Edgar Hoover appointed head of Federal Bureau of Investigation
1925: Mussolini assumes dictatorship of Italy; The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes (Scopes “Monkey” Trial); Locarno Treaty; Mitchell court-martialed for insubordination
1926: Józef Piłsudski becomes dictator of Poland; Lithuania overthrows elected government; dictatorship established in Portugal; U.S. unemployment hits all-time low of 1.6 percent
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