It has become a kind of axiomatic shorthand among today’s Westerners to talk about this Leninist creation—from CHEKA to KGB—as though it were nothing more than the so-called intelligence services commonly established by other nations as subordinate adjuncts of civil government.
Obviously, however, and by design, CHEKA was not subordinate to any government. Up until that point, Lenin’s organizational victories had resulted in the unique creation of a Party-State. With his creation of CHEKA, that Party-State became in its very essence what it has since remained: a counterintelligence state.
Given that the Party itself was the creature of Lenin’s adaptation of Marxist ideology, and given Lenin’s own ideal of the worldwide Workers’ Paradise, it followed that the Party would have to pursue its built-in ideological millennial imperative. Its mandate, its function and its destiny were to head the worldwide proletarian revolution that would usher in the millennium of that Workers’ Paradise on earth. Armed with CHEKA, Lenin’s counterintelligence Party-State was ready to become the executor of history’s mandate on the geopolitical plane.
Virtually all of the stunning reorganization and creation of Party structures dedicated to that single-minded purpose was well on the way to completion by 1918, when, under Lenin’s guidance and at his behest, the infant Sovnarkom transformed itself by a unanimous vote of its delegates into the rawboned youth calling itself the Russian Federation of Socialist Republics (RSFR). Like Sovnarkom, the RSFR was to be but a passing instrument in the hands of the Leninist Party-State. Quickly, the RSFR adopted Lenin’s 1917 draft constitution as basic law, complete with its mandate for the overthrow of capitalist regimes by violent force.
In that same year, Lenin already lamented that “our CHEKA unfortunately does not extend to America.”
Seeking the first pegs on which to anchor a geopolitical network that would hasten the day of worldwide proletarian revolution, Lenin seized upon an earlier initiative of European socialists. This was the International Workingmen’s Association, founded with Karl Marx’s participation in London in 1864. Known as the First International, it had been succeeded by a refurbished Second International in 1889. It was at the Moscow Congress of 1919, convened to produce the Third International, that Lenin seized control and created the Communist International (the Comintern), intending it to be an international clone of his own CP. The Comintern did indeed function as that Party clone, until it was dissolved by Stalin in 1943. He did not need it anymore.
By the end of 1920 and into 1921, Lenin had in place the beginnings of a network covering Western Europe and the Americas. It began with single individuals—“moles,” in latter-day jargon—placed strategically so that they could work clandestinely toward their ultimate function of promoting the revolution, now constitutionally mandated abroad by the Leninist Party-State in its drive to the millennium.
Never one to miss the full opportunities afforded by structural reorganization, Lenin took two more ingenious steps, one hard upon the other. In December 1920, he created the Foreign Department (IND) of his enforcement arm, CHEKA. Then, in 1921, he reorganized the “third section” of the Red Army into the Intelligence Directorate (RU), which he placed under the direct control of CHEKA’s IND.
As night follows day, then, it followed that the secret role of RU in foreign intelligence was to be an obedient extension of Soviet domestic intelligence. That is, the aims of RU abroad were identical with CHEKA’s domestic aims: first, to establish and protect the Party-State across the world as nothing more or less than a global counterintelligence state. And, second, to guard the ideological purity of the workers’ revolution always and everywhere.
The means used by RU—and by its successor organization, GRU, to this day—in carrying out its assigned role was the intimate and completely clandestine interlayering of its own personnel within the diplomatic missions sent by the Party-State all over the world.
No image more exactly conveys the working ideal of this most clandestine army of the Leninist structure abroad than webs spun by a spider from its very entrails. Webs so transparent as to be invisible unless—improbably—the light of day were to shine directly upon their ever-widening embrace of individuals, governments and societies.
Complementing this invisible structure was a second one that also rode piggyback on diplomatic missions. Or, more exactly, it redefined the basic purpose of Soviet diplomatic missions to include the counterintelligence functions already enshrined in Moscow’s machinery.
Under the direction and control of CHEKA, diplomatic missions—in addition to acting as funnels for the entry of RU’s moles around the world—were themselves transformed into export vehicles for the Leninist ideal. Every diplomatic mission was to have the same ultimate objective as the Soviet Party-State it represented.
It was not merely logical, therefore, but unavoidable that the foreign policy of the Leninist Party-State would be conducted through its diplomatic missions on two tiers. On the overt level, the necessary diplomatic relations proper to every state were carried on in a more or less usual manner, by more or less usual personnel—ambassadors, consuls, chargés d’affaires and the general contingent of accredited individuals.
At a decidedly unusual level, meanwhile, the IND arm of CHEKA saw to the systematic inclusion of a dedicated intelligence component within the staff of every diplomatic mission around the world.
Separate and independent from the totally covert RU network—and sometimes at odds with it, though both were controlled ultimately by CHEKA—this IND diplomatic intelligence component was multidimensional. It was the chief instrument through which Moscow’s policy directives were delivered to the more or less normal mission personnel. And it was Lenin’s organizational insurance policy, guaranteeing that his foreign missions themselves would be kept in line.
But it was far more than a mere monitor and control sector. For this intelligence component was designed as well to carry on its officially assigned and directed program of espionage and counterintelligence abroad.
IND activity abroad wasn’t as invisible as the web spun by the RU, to be sure. But it was nicely camouflaged all the same.
Under the cover of such seemingly benign front organizations as “friendship” societies, cultural organizations, labor unions, peace movements, and the like, Lenin used IND to set in place the successful model for what was to become one of the most effective official programs of daily, systematic and dedicated international espionage and counterintelligence ever devised, a program that finally embraced industry, political institutions, military matters and cultural affairs in every nation that hosted an accredited Soviet diplomatic mission.
In 1922, the RFSR transformed itself—again at Lenin’s behest, and again by unanimous vote—into the fully formed adult we know as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The home-based Communist Party (CP), therefore, became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).
By that time, in his single-minded fanaticism, and with his neverfailing organizational genius, Lenin had established the interlocking domestic and international network upon which the geopolitical institution of Leninist Marxism would continue to be built. And he had established as bedrock the three most basic principles of that institution.
The first principle was that the world dictatorship of the proletariat could be established only by violent revolution, resulting in the overthrow of capitalist-based governments. The choice for violence, made irrevocably before he was twenty, was Lenin’s most enduring personal thumb-mark. It stamped all of his thinking, planning and organization for the worldwide proletarian revolution. And, therefore, it determined the course of Soviet history, and that of much of the world, for most of the twentieth century.
The second bedrock Leninist principle dealt with authority and structure. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, because of the experience it claimed in revolution, always knew best. For that reason, all non-Russian CPs were to function as local branches of the CPSU. Any CP outside Russi
a was to be organized along the same lines. Moreover, each foreign CP must be subject to the CPSU—to the centralized control of Lenin and his successors—both in its choice of local CC members, and in its policies.
The third Leninist principle was the basic counterintelligence dimension of Party rule. That principle would hold in the Soviet Party-State and would be extended country by country as an essential element of the proletarian Paradise.
Long after Lenin’s corpse was encased in glass and granite beneath Red Square, and long after his ideal of the world as the Workers’ Paradise had been betrayed, those principles would stand as the pillars upon which the Soviet geopolitical institution he made possible would be based. His firm conviction about the international—and ultimately the geopolitical—role of the USSR remained as the ineradicable hallmark of the authentic Leninist-Marxist mind.
Lenin’s errors of judgment are patently clear to a later generation, and to list them does magnify one’s horror at his mental provincialism; at the same time it underlines the mountain to which Mikhail Gorbachev has set his shoulder.
Relying on analyses produced by Marx in the last third of the nineteenth century—analyses already flawed in themselves and, in any case, based on data no longer valid in the twentieth century, Lenin went on to commit his gravest mistake in judgment. Led by slanted or incomplete data of his own, his perspective distorted by what amounted to wishful thinking, Lenin presumed that everywhere there was a vast downtrodden proletariat “structure.” And he assumed that everywhere an utterly oppressive “superstructure” lay atop the proletariat like an incubus.
Topple that superstructure, he imagined, and—Presto!—the proletariat would rise as one world body and destroy its oppressors.
If the workers of the world did not arise in wrath, it was only because capitalism—in its agonizing death throes—had temporarily prolonged its life by expanding into colonial areas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But he saw it collapsing with the start of World War I. With that collapse, Lenin was certain that the last alternative for the decadent capitalist systems would be spent. Soon, therefore, very soon, there would be an overwhelming wave of revolutions. They were just waiting to be sparked among the working classes everywhere—in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas. One supposes that such a simplistic trust in a coming wave of revolutions was at least bolstered in Lenin’s mind by the visible breakup of empires, and by the economic plight of post-World War I Europe.
Having renounced all reliance on the moral and religious traditions that had made Western civilization possible in the first place, however, Lenin suffered from a poverty of alternatives. His organizational genius was undeniable. But his intellectualism was a borrowed and piecemeal thing; and it had gone barren. Like Marx before him, he was guilty of a false and subjective reading of history that left him with an appallingly skewed vision of what the future must be like. And not the least of it was his misreading from start to finish of how free-market economics would actually fare, and of how resilient was democracy as preserved in capitalist nations.
There was one quickly passing moment toward the end of his life when Lenin had within arm’s reach the possibility of correcting the most fatal flaws in his Leninism. It came in the person of a relatively obscure and resourceless Sardinian by the name of Antonio Gramsci.
A convinced Marxist living in Italy at the very moment Benito Mussolini came to power, Gramsci took off for Lenin’s USSR in 1922 and remained there for the last two years of Lenin’s life. He absorbed all of Lenin’s geopolitical vision, and all of Lenin’s conviction that a force innate in mankind was driving it on toward the “Workers’ Paradise.”
For all that, however, Gramsci was too aware of the facts of history and of life to accept the gratuitous assumption—made in the first instance by Marx, and then accepted unquestioningly by Lenin—that human society was divided throughout the world into the two broad and simple camps defined as the oppressed “structure” of the people and the oppressive “superstructure” of capitalism.
As a well-informed historian and a well-trained objective analyst, Gramsci argued against such deceptive imaginings. He argued and wrote about a common culture that had forged a complex homogeneity among all the classes in the Western capitalist nations. He recognized it as a culture that had been seeded and brought to fruition by nearly two thousand years of religion and politics, literature and art, war and peace. There was no chasm, said Gramsci, between the proletarian masses and what Marx and Lenin called the superstructure. There was only social advantage and economic predominance.
As a realist, Gramsci knew he was knocking his Marxist head against the bulwark of Christian culture, which pointed unceasingly to something beyond man and outside man’s material cosmos. Gramsci’s triumph—a posthumous one, as it turned out—was that he understood how that Christian bulwark could be and would be undone; and it had nothing to do with violent revolution and the universal uprising of the proletariat. Indeed, it was a solution that would prove to be far more subtle and far more effective than anything imagined by Marx or Lenin.
Gramsci’s discussions and arguments on this crucial point of Leninist violence did not earn him any great popularity among his socialist brothers in the Moscow of that time, however. By the time he left the Soviet Union, Gramsci knew the world would face two specters in the immediate future. The Fascism of Mussolini—“il gran pappone di tutto fascismo” (the granddaddy of all Fascists), as he later described the Italian dictator—was the first specter. The rise of Stalin in the Soviet Union was the second.
Gramsci chose to make his stand in Italy. His day in the Leninist sun would be postponed. But it would come.
While it is testimony to Lenin’s driving persuasiveness, and to Feliks Dzerzhinsky’s prowess at seductive deception, it is hardly to their own credit that over time—and unlike the clear-eyed Gramsci—a certain number of highly regarded intellectuals in England, France, Germany and the United States bought into Lenin’s reading of history, flaws and all.
The Depression at the end of the twenties and in the thirties was the convincer for those minds. Stunted by the same poverty of historic alternatives that afflicted Lenin, and willing to believe Dzerzhinsky’s sophisticated scenarios—“disinformation” was the word the Soviets finally coined—those intellectuals could conceive of no choice left for the West except Sovietization. The permanent Marxism of an Edmund Wilson, and the slavish adulation of Stalin by so many English and Americans, are explicable if not excusable in the light of an intellectualism that was less realistic than romantic, and that was easily cuckolded.
Lincoln Steffens raised the most apt and famous banner for this group. With one visit to the USSR behind him, Steffens was like a teenager in love. “I have seen the future” in the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin, he declared with an unreserved and now manifest fatheadedness, “and it works.”
It had to be admitted that the free press of the West did nothing to disabuse such fatheaded assessments. There were no Gramscis among the journalists sent by the major Western news organizations as resident correspondents to Moscow over the years. There were no news flashes alerting the world to the mass liquidation of millions of political enemies of the Leninist-Marxist proletarian revolution on its bloody path to the Marxian ideal of the Workers’ Paradise. There were no protest votes at the assemblies of the old League of Nations, no diplomatic protests by Western powers, no sanctions applied by the international community. On the contrary, a steady stream of well-placed magazine and newspaper articles kept on extolling the glories of “what was going on over in Russia,” as Bernard Shaw described it, “and how finally commonsense and reason are prevailing over the worn-out shibboleths of past ages.” Lenin and Dzerzhinsky must have smiled in satisfaction, and Stalin must have been highly satisfied. The deception was working admirably.
12
Joseph Stalin
Symptoms of cerebral sclerosis were already manifest in Lenin by March of 1921. His physica
l deterioration was hastened, no doubt, by the two bullets that remained lodged in his neck and his left shoulder following an attempt on his life in 1918. Ignoring his physical decline, however—and at his most benign shunting aside all criticism, including the clever and prophetic ideas of Antonio Gramsci—Lenin worked on as hard as he could at perfecting his created instrument for violent world revolution.
On February 6, 1922, CHEKA was replaced by a new organization, the State Political Directorate (GPU). Lenin wanted to get rid of “deadwood” in the organization and to implement the lessons learned about counterintelligence not merely as a security service but as a systemic principle for the domestic and foreign functioning of the USSR PartyState.
Despite the fact that Lenin’s weakened physical condition was regarded by his physicians as temporary, the need was apparent, by the time the Eleventh Party Congress assembled in Moscow in April of 1922, to appoint someone to carry on until Lenin could regain his strength and resume full control.
The temporary post of General Secretary was created. And, though it was intended as a momentary expedient, the post carried with it control over the Secretariat—the first and most powerful section of the Central Committee of the CPSU. Control, therefore, over the entire machinery of the proletarian revolution.
The Party’s choice to fill this post, aided by Lenin’s vote, fell on a man who had been Lenin’s close follower since shortly after the turn of the century: the forty-three-year-old Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili.
Born in Gori, Georgia, on December 21, 1879, to a sadistic shoemaker, Vissarion, and a rigidly orthodox and pious mother, Keke, Iosif was destined by Keke to be a Russian Orthodox priest. He did enter the seminary, stayed for five years, and then was dismissed for “disloyal views.”
There followed a more or less murky period in which it is extremely difficult to detach later created legends from original events. Dzhugashvili was into revolution, that much is sure. He was supposedly a socialist with Marxist views. But rather compelling evidence indicates that he did function as a onetime agent for the dreaded Czarist secret security police, the Okhrana, who were hunting to the death all such revolutionaries as Lenin and his Bolsheviks.
Keys of This Blood Page 28
