The Dilemmas of Lenin. Tariq Ali
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Disborough, Ireton, Rainsborough, Goff, Whaley and Joyce all fit the bill.6
A century or so later the French revolutionary army was built on a similar pattern. Its most capable generals were plucked from the ranks or from the streets and rapidly promoted to replace the military nobility. In 1789, some of the most famous and highly regarded officers of the revolutionary and later the Napoleonic armies were in lowly positions. Davout, Desaix, Marmont and MacDonald were subalterns; Bernadotte (who later refounded the Swedish monarchy) was a sergeant-major; Hoche, Marceau, Lefebre, Pichegru, Ney, Masséna, Murat and Soult were noncommissioned officers; Augereau was a fencing master; Lannes was a dyer; Gouvion Saint-Cyr was an actor; Jourdan was a peddler; Bessières was a barber; Brune was a compositor; Joubert and Junot were law students; Kléber was an architect; Marrier did not see any military service until the revolution.7
It was the same with the Red Army created after the revolution and welded into a fighting force by Leon Trotsky, one of the few examples in history of a militarised intellectual. His famous appeal for the creation of a Red cavalry (‘Proletarians to Horse’) indicated the composition of the new army. In fact, the problem was a lack of officers experienced in basic military technique; a number of tsarist officers were press-ganged into service under the watchful eyes of political commissars (the equivalent of Agitators in the New Model Army). One of them, serving in the imperial army, was an autodidact and a military leader of genius whose story, long forgotten, requires a brief retelling, not least because Lenin and Trotsky regarded him as a vital third arm, necessary to continue politics by other means. This was Mikhail Tukhachevsky. His role in the civil war showcased his astonishing military capacities.8
The difference between Lenin and his revolutionary predecessors lay in this: both Cromwell and Robespierre embraced the revolution once they were confronted by its actuality. It would have taken place even without them. Lenin had begun working for a revolution twenty-five years before 1917. For twenty-four of those years he had worked underground, in prison, in exile. He had done so without imagining that he would see one in his lifetime. In January 1917, still in exile, he confessed to a Swiss audience that he and the generation to which he belonged might never witness success. They were fighting for the future. Milton had declared that Englishmen loyal to the king were not free men, that royalism was a form of moral slavery. For Lenin it was the same, with regard to believers in capitalism, empires and the autocracy. A much bigger enemy than the English monarchy had to be confronted and defeated globally. He, if not his party, was fully prepared for what needed to be done, in keeping with his view that at all times one must ‘aussprechen, was ist’: speak of what is and avoid transforming wishful thinking into the truth. A hard-headed revolutionary realism, Lenin argued throughout his political life, was crucial in times of victory, defeat and transition. It is this clear-sightedness that explains many of the decisions he made during his lifetime. He never grasped the enormity of his own contribution as a theoretician, but the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács did so. In an emotionally charged essay written just weeks after Lenin’s death in 1924, he described him ‘in a world historical sense [as] the only theoretician equal to Marx yet produced by the struggle for the liberation of the proletariat.’9
Lenin was decisive not only in ensuring the success of the revolution against a majority of the Central Committee, but also in safeguarding the infant republic by making all necessary concessions to the Germans at Brest-Litovsk that would have seriously truncated revolutionary Russia. Once again he was in a minority on the Central Committee. Once again he fought back. His opponents within and outside the party accused him of betrayal. He admitted it was a ‘shameful’ peace, but was convinced that it was necessary to secure a respite for the revolution. The left faction, that included Bukharin and Kollontai, demanded a revolutionary war against Germany; Trotsky argued for masterly inactivity that he described as ‘neither war nor peace’; Lenin supported accepting the territorial demands of the kaiser. It would only be a temporary retreat, as the German Reich would soon be overthrown by the German workers. In any event, it would be impossible to fight the German armies and Russian reaction at the same time. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was a necessary expedient. The German high command was already extremely annoyed by the fact that the Bolshevik delegation was led by uppity Jews who, on arrival, had authorised the distribution of subversive leaflets urging German soldiers to mutiny. Once again history refused to completely contradict Lenin.10 Germany lost the war and came close to a revolution, but never went beyond getting rid of its monarchy.
For five critical years from 1917 to 1922, Lenin had remained at the helm of the state. War Communism had been necessary to win the civil war. No mean achievement. The White armies had dissolved but the decline in revolutionary fervor was only too visible. The setbacks in Hungary, Poland and Germany were accompanied by the temporary restabilisation of capitalism in 1921. The March Uprising in central Germany that year was a disastrous, desperate and irresponsible last-ditch effort by Zinoviev and Béla Kun to arouse the German masses. Carried out with the imprimatur of the Communist International, it completely misjudged the situation and undermined the already weak German Communist Party. The frontiers of the Soviet state were now settled. The revolution in Europe had receded. The cream of the Russian working class was either dead or exhausted. Revolutionary politics was at its lowest ebb.
This necessitated a new plan. The result was the New Economic Policy (NEP), a state-invigilated reentry of small-scale capitalism. NEP was conceived as a transitional measure to revive the economy, at which it succeeded, improving food supplies and distribution networks. But while NEP was taking effect, the country was hit by a series of natural disasters, including droughts, sand blizzards and an invasion of locusts in the southern provinces. Famine struck, affecting the lives of millions. With it grew the black market, squalid as ever, but, for the moment, untouchable. Many workers fled to their villages. The proletariat had dispersed. The revolutionary dictatorship was now truly functioning in a vacuum. This fact made the character and capacities of individual leaders much more important than institutions like the party and the soviet. The Bolsheviks, at this point, resembled the Jacobins. Slowly the social and economic situation improved, but by that time the party that had created a revolution resembled a bureaucracy more with each passing day. Some felt that there was no alternative. Not Lenin.
The last dilemma he was to confront was also the most difficult. Felled by a stroke, he was ordered to rest both physically and politically and forced to step back from overseeing and guiding the daily life of the new state. Lenin was a bad patient. He refused to stop reading the newspapers or thinking about politics. While attending what would be his last party congress in April 1922, he felt alienated from the direction the state was taking. He accepted his share of responsibility and, while recognising the role of material causes in setting the party on this path, he was shaken by how far along it the party had gone and concerned with the subjective factor, namely the party and its leadership. ‘Powerful forces’, he wrote, ‘had diverted the Soviet state from its “proper road” ‘. Lenin’s last writings were a courageous attempt to make the party change course. He thought of historical examples of a nation’s defeat when the vanquished had managed to impose their culture on the victors, defeating them in spirit. He felt that the old tsarist bureaucracy had managed to conquer his colleagues, who had easily adopted the old methods of governance, if not the cultural practices, of their past oppressors. Yes, he did write about all of this, as I detail in the concluding chapters of this book. And he apologised: ‘I am, it seems, strongly guilty before the workers of Russia.’ It was almost as if he had been rereading Engels’s essay ‘The Peasant War in Germany’:
The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class which he represents and for the realisation of the measures which that domination would imply. What he can do depends not upon his will but upon the sharpness of the clash of interests between the various classes, and upon the degree of development of the material means of existence, the relations of production and means of communication upon which the clash of interests of the classes is based every time. What he ought to do, what his party demands of him, again depends not upon him, or upon the degree of development of the class struggle and its conditions. He is bound to his doctrines and the demands hitherto propounded which do not emanate from the interrelations of the social classes