CHAPTER 4 MARCH 1917 - MARCH 1921: LENIN AND THE PROBLEM OF BUILDING SOCIALISM The importance for Stalin and for his thinking about Lenin of the issue of building socialism in Russia can scarcely be overestimated. It was Lenin s radical concept of the revolution and especially his singular vision that the revolution would proceed to the achievement of a democratic republic and then to socialism 1 that won him a measure of renewed respect from Stalin in March and April 1917. When Stalin and his fellow Russian socialists were trying to take their bearings after the sudden collapse of tsarism, Lenin s bold proclamation from distant Zurich gave radically inclined Bolsheviks a direction and a goal. That Stalin, despite the negative political and personal judgments of Lenin he had drawn from his experiences with him before 1917, joined Lenin s campaign to make a socialist revolution in Russia testifies to the powerful attraction that Lenin s idea had for him. The vigor and determination with which the fiery Lenin fought to win acceptance of his views within the Party doubtless also appealed to Stalin. Though significant differences about tactics remained between them, Stalin s acceptance (or toleration) of Lenin s leadership indicates the paramount importance of the direction Lenin provided. But by June and certainly by July, Lenin s retreat from militancy had eroded much of his standing with Stalin. And, as Lenin s erratic tactics exhausted Stalin s patience, by October Stalin figuratively consigned Lenin to the archives. 2 After October 1917 perhaps the only aspect of Lenin s leadership for which Stalin might have had some measure of respect was his continuing commitment to pursue class warfare and to transform Russia into a socialist society. But as we have seen, his commitment began to weaken as early as December 1919, and it waned steadily throughout 1920. By early 1921 a desperate Lenin was instituting a substantial restoration of capitalism. Stalin reacted to this extremity in an extreme manner, but before we
2 examine Stalin s response we need to take a fuller look at the process by which Lenin s thinking about building socialism changed. Lenin s call for a socialist revolution in backward Russia had departed so radically from Marxist orthodoxy that it initially stunned most of his fellow Russian Social Democrats. Marx had taught that societies advance by passing through a sequence of necessary stages of historical development; accordingly, the prevailing wisdom was that agrarian Russian, just emerging from tsarist feudalism, would have to experience a prolonged period of bourgeois rule and capitalist industrialization before becoming ready for socialism. Lenin s moderate Menshevik opponents and even many Bolsheviks believed that any attempt to carry out a socialist revolution in Russia was premature, destined to fail, and harmful to the long-term interests of democratic socialism. 3 But Lenin, determined to press on toward socialism, charged that his critics wanted to sacrifice living Marxism to the dead letter. Because of the world war, events had outpaced all predictions, presenting unique and unforeseeable opportunities to advance the cause of socialism, Lenin argued, and seizing these required ideological creativity. The victory of a workers revolution in Russia, he promised, would accelerate the revolt of the international proletariat which, in its turn, would assist the Russian workers, as would the semi-proletarian peasant masses of Russia. Lenin believed that with these allies the Russian working class could achieve that which it was not yet strong enough to achieve alone: it could build socialism. 4 Believing that a proletarian revolution and the creation of a communal state for the purpose of the transition to socialism was the only way out of Russia s desperate situation, Lenin charged in April 1917 that his critics have deserted socialism, have betrayed socialism, and have gone over to the bourgeois class enemy. Such intolerance was typical of him. In September, for example, he attacked as pseudo-marxist lackeys of the bourgeoisie those who say that we are not ripe for socialism, that it is too early to introduce socialism. Claiming that anyone who understands Marxist theory is bound
3 to admit that there can be no advance except toward socialism, Lenin asserted that those who fear to advance toward socialism cannot be revolutionary democrats in the twentieth century. A fortnight before the October Revolution his voice became shriller still: the fear of marching toward socialism, he declared, was the most contemptible treason to the cause of the proletariat. 5 Of Lenin s determination to build a socialist society there could be no doubt. Through struggle and perseverance Lenin won endorsement of his radical vision in August 1917 by the Bolshevik Sixth Party Congress, which resolved that revolutionary elements in Russia should devote all efforts to taking state power into their own hands and to guiding the state, in alliance with the revolutionary proletariat of the advanced countries, toward peace and the socialist reconstruction of society. 6 But the point was unclear: could Russia go forward merely hoping for Western assistance, or could it go forward only if it received Western aid? Absent from the Congress, Lenin did not address the issue, and in the months ahead he offered no clarification. On the morning after the seizure of power, for example, he voiced his intention to advance firmly toward socialism based on the ambiguous assumption that the proletariat of the West European countries will help us to achieve a complete and lasting victory for the cause of socialism. 7 Conditions for achieving a complete and lasting victory were not the issue in 1917; whether Russia, on her own, could start to build socialism was. Looking back on 1917 two years later, Lenin was still vague: Both prior to October and during the October Revolution, we always said that we regard ourselves and can only regard ourselves as one of the contingents of the international proletarian army, a contingent that came to the fore, not because of its level of development and preparedness, but because of Russia s exceptional conditions; we always said that the victory of the socialist revolution, therefore, can only be regarded as final when it becomes the victory of the proletariat in at least several advanced countries Our banking on world revolution, if you could call it that, has on the whole been fully justified. 8 How banking on world revolution could be regarded as fully justified when the elusive world revolution became every day a more remote prospect is a mystery, and Lenin s
4 tortured reasoning in defense of his policy reveals his continuing inability to face the ambiguity that was at its heart. Nonetheless, Lenin s words do confirm that he had been banking on world revolution. At the Sixth Party Congress Stalin voiced a simpler confidence in the possibility that Russia will be the country that will lay the road to socialism, invoking creative Marxism to buttress his belief. 9 Lenin s intention to transform society was apparent also in his call, made upon his return to Russia in April 1917, for a new Party Program to replace the outdated document of 1903 and for his followers to take the name Communist in order to distinguish themselves from Social Democrats who supported the policies of the Provisional Government. 10 But not until March 1918 was a new name the Russian Communist Party (bolsheviks), or RCP(b) chosen. For a new Party program, Lenin had to wait still another year. A new Party Program was finally adopted in March 1919 at the Eighth Party Congress. Based on Lenin s proposals, the new Program affirmed the goal of building socialism, sanctified measures already taken in the initial stages of the transition from capitalism to communism, and mapped out further steps toward the ultimate goal. The expropriation of the urban bourgeoisie, already well advanced, was to be completed and a socialized industry established. Equal remuneration of labor was endorsed as a major aim, though it was not yet feasible primarily because of the need for bourgeois technical experts. In the countryside, where private property in land had been abolished immediately after the October Revolution, efforts to organize a large-scale socialist agriculture should continue, as should the resolute struggle against the rural bourgeoisie. The new Program ratified efforts already underway to replace all private trade with a single nationwide distribution network of consumers cooperatives and to expand the sphere of non-monetary exchange, though the complete abolition of money remained in the future. Despite the need for some half-measures, the progress already
5 made in transforming Russia reassured the Party to continue the march toward full communism. 11 Acting on the belief that the socialist economic order must be rational, the Eighth Party Congress further resolved that the consolidation of all economic activity in the country according to a general state plan was one of the most fundamental tasks in the building of socialism. 12 Lenin himself was a strong proponent of central planning of economic life and of a single plan in particular. 13 Nevertheless, little progress toward a comprehensive plan had been made by February 1920, when the highest administrative organ of the Soviet government, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK), directed that a nationwide state economic plan on scientific lines be drawn up and implemented. An agency known as GOELRO (the acronym for the State Commission for the Electrification of Russia) was established to develop the plan. 14 Electrification was chosen as the focus of the planning effort because it would have the greatest and most immediate benefit in stimulating growth and modernization in all areas of Russian economic life. When GOELRO presented its draft plan in December 1920, Lenin praised it to the Eighth Congress of Soviets as placing Russia on the real economic basis required for communism and even called it the second Program of our Party. 15 The Congress approved the plan and authorized the VTsIK to move promptly toward implementing it. 16 Though adoption of the GOELRO plan might have seemed a great step forward in the advance toward communism, it was in fact the high-water mark of that campaign. Just a few days before Lenin lavishly praised the electrification proposal, he had taken steps down a different road, one which would soon lead to shelving the GOELRO plan and, indeed, to postponing the whole struggle to build socialism. Lenin was beginning to execute what Stalin later would call an abrupt turn away from the Party s policy of the offensive and toward restoring capitalism, a turn so abrupt that it could have split the Party. 17 It was a turn that Lenin felt he had to make to save his regime from disaster.
6 From the outset, the attempt to transform Russia was severely handicapped, perhaps even doomed. The Bolsheviks were trying to build socialism, after all, in an economic disaster area: a developing country hammered by almost seven years of world war, foreign invasions, and civil war. Russia s narrow industrial base, fragile transportation system, and quaint agriculture had been unable to stand up under the demands of the war with Germany and were exhausted when the Bolsheviks took power. Serious shortages of food, fuel, locomotives, goods and materiel of all sorts, and labor, both in the factories and in the fields, crippled the country. To these problems the Bolsheviks, by alienating the middle class, added another: a shortage of managers and technical experts. In the countryside, the break-up during the revolutionary year of large landed estates into less efficient peasant small-holdings further undercut food production. Two and half additional years of particularly brutal and destructive civil war turned exhaustion into collapse and brought Russia to the brink of famine. Because of the urgent need for food and because the country which the Bolsheviks were trying to transform was overwhelmingly agrarian, the most important element of Soviet economic policy in 1918-1921 concerned the procurement of grain and other foodstuffs. The communist approach, commonly called requisitioning, was to require peasants to sell to the state at fixed prices all produce above a level determined by the state to be necessary for subsistence. Food hoarded by peasants was confiscated by squads of workers and poor peasants. Ideally, peasants would be able to buy manufactured goods with the paper money they were paid for the grain they were forced to sell to the state. But with industry and transport near collapse, scarcely any consumer goods flowed to the countryside. Consequently, the money received by the peasants had little real value, and peasants had correspondingly little incentive to produce the surplus foodstuffs which the society so badly needed. With peasants increasingly choosing to grow only what they needed to sustain themselves, the economic base of the regime eroded and food shortages became ever more severe. 18
7 Failure to deal effectively with Russia s economic troubles had helped to bring down first the tsarist and then the Provisional governments in 1917, and Lenin believed that the Bolsheviks too would fall if they did not solve the food and peasant problems. Speaking in December 1920 at the Eighth Congress of Soviets, he admitted that Russia was still a country of peasants whose minds were filled with selfish capitalist notions. This widespread peasant mentality created a firmer basis for capitalism in Russia than for communism, he said, and it gave the internal enemy a stronger foundation than the Bolsheviks themselves possessed. The only way to undermine capitalism, stressed Lenin, was to electrify the country, eventually placing the whole economy, including agriculture, on the technical basis of modern large-scale industry. Electrification, however, would require substantial resources and would take at least a decade. 19 But the Bolsheviks did not have a decade. The failure of food procurement policy increasingly imperiled the Soviet regime and forced it to change course drastically. Through the latter half of 1920 peasant unrest turned more and more into violence: in over a dozen provinces the authorities were unable to collect grain. The agricultural crisis called into question the loyalty of millions of Red Army soldiers of peasant origin, and even among proletarians discontent was spreading, as manifested in early 1921 by strikes and demonstrations against Bolshevik policies by starving workers in Petrograd. The growth of disaffection within the regime s social base was confirmed by the admission by Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the head of the secret police, that more workers and peasants than bourgeois class enemies filled the jails. 20 By February Lenin acknowledged that the situation was so desperate and downright dangerous that it obliged the government to make concessions to the peasantry. 21 That requisitioning, by depriving the peasants of incentives to work and produce, was harmful to the interests of the Soviet regime had been recognized a year earlier, in February 1920, by the People s Commissar for War, Trotsky, who called for relaxing requisitioning and allowing a measure of economic freedom. Trotsky s proposal was
8 rejected, however, by a majority of the Central Committee, including Lenin, who continued to believe that the state grain monopoly was essential to the success of the socialist revolution. 22 Freedom to trade, Lenin preached again and again, was the seedbed of capitalism; it meant freedom for the rich to exploit the poor, and it would inexorably lead to the dissolution of the alliance of the peasants and the workers and to the return of undivided power to the landowners and capitalists. Because he believed that free trade would allow grain hoarders to enslave the workers, Lenin insisted that the attitude of Communists toward petty-bourgeois elements who called for free trade must be one of war. Communists who favored free trade he branded fools and traitors. 23 But even as Lenin railed against advocates of free trade, he was beginning to soften his position on the treatment of class enemies. As we have already noted, he showed unproletarian sympathy for bourgeois specialists as early as in late 1919, and by early 1920 he was publicly questioning the value of coercion against the peasants and acknowledging their legitimate rights to a fair return on their labor. 24 By November 1920 the shift in his thinking was nearly complete. At his prompting, the Council of People s Commissars established a commission to consider instituting a tax in kind to replace requisitioning. 25 Despite Lenin s authority, the idea of ending requisitioning still encountered stiff opposition within the Soviet hierarchy; as late as February 1921 opposition was apparently substantial enough that Lenin was trying to sell his proposed reform as an experiment for a limited time. 26 It was probably only the rebellion early in March of the sailors of the Baltic Fleet and the Kronstadt naval base near Petrograd sailors who had been key supporters of the Bolsheviks in 1917 that persuaded a majority of Party leaders of the political necessity of abandoning requisitioning. The momentous and abrupt shift to the right in Soviet policy finally came at the Tenth Party Congress, which convened in Moscow even while the Kronstadt revolt raged. 27 On Lenin s motion, the Congress on March 15 28 scrapped requisitioning in favor of a tax in kind structured to stimulate agricultural production. After paying the tax,
9 peasants would be able to sell their remaining product on the free market. Rural trade would be revived by an influx of manufactured goods to be acquired from abroad with the proceeds of large foreign loans Lenin hoped to receive. 29 Though Lenin s remarks dealt almost exclusively with the countryside, a passing admission that we overdid the nationalization of industry and trade hinted at a broader restoration of capitalism. 30 By early summer, in fact, private enterprise was reviving in the cities, and the regime was leasing some nationalized enterprises back to their former owners. The government still controlled the commanding heights of the economy banking, large-scale industry, transport, and foreign trade but Lenin s New Economic Policy (NEP), as the concessions to private enterprise came to be known, halted the march toward communism and reinstituted a substantial measure of capitalism. 31 Lenin justified his proposal by arguing straightforwardly that his new course was essential if the Bolsheviks were to retain power. Because the assistance from the European proletariat on which he had counted had failed to materialize, Lenin insisted that Russia s economic exhaustion left the Communist regime no choice but to seek help from capitalists and, above all, from the peasantry. So vital was peasant support, he admitted frankly, that it would be impossible to preserve the rule of the proletariat in Russia were free trade not restored. 32 This was a sober and realistic conclusion. But it was not a conclusion that Lenin could square with Party principle. Though he acknowledged that policy must be based on principle, 33 he could not find the communist principle that legitimized building capitalism. Indeed, admitting that elements of his proposal violated the Party Program, he placed the blame on the Program, which he declared unsound in practice. 34 Evidently Lenin had forgotten that he had written most of the Program. Lenin compounded this attack on the Party s basic statement of aims and principles by criticizing those Communists who had believed that Russia could be transformed in three years; they were, he said, dreamers. 35 For good measure, he
10 denounced those who were suspicious of his rapprochement with capitalism or who sneered at his proposals as either bureaucratic or just irresponsible. 36 In answering a series of his own rhetorical questions, Lenin tacitly admitted that his proposal conflicted with Party principle. How can a Communist Party recognize freedom of trade and accept it? Doesn t the proposition contain irreconcilable contradictions? What does it mean, he asked, what limits are there to this exchange, how is it all to be implemented? His response was no answer at all: Anyone who expects to get an answer at this Congress, he advised, will be disappointed. The answer would be forthcoming in legislation yet to be written but it would be the right answer, Lenin implied, because our Party is the governmental party and the decision of the Party Congress will be binding on the entire Republic. In other words, power not conformity with socialist principle would legitimize the new policy. Indeed, Lenin seemed to be far more concerned with pragmatic considerations, such as the need to ram his proposal through the Congress before the peasants began their spring planting, than with issues of principle. 37 Lenin tried to mask the extent of his departure from Party principle by claiming that the policies he was scrapping had not really been aimed at building socialism at all but were only expedients with which we were saddled by the imperative conditions of wartime. 38 Though he occasionally lapsed as on March 16 in his concluding remarks to the Congress when he admitted that we have been working for several years now to lay, for the first time in history, the foundations of a socialist society 39 in the main he stuck to the story that past policies, which he soon dubbed War Communism, had been meant only to enable the regime to withstand the assaults of counter-revolutionary and foreign armies. 40 This convenient historical fiction allowed Lenin to argue that the wartime policies of 1918-1921 had been rendered obsolete by the coming of peace and hence that new approaches were needed. It also allowed him to insinuate that the tax-in-kind concept, which had been embodied in an abortive law in 1918, was more truly
11 representative of the Party s unfettered thought on the peasant problem than the allegedly aberrant practice of requisitioning. 41 Thus Lenin could defend the retreat from socialist construction to capitalism on the ground that there really was no retreat at all just a return to a sound, peacetime approach to economic recovery which wartime conditions had forced the Party temporarily to shelve. This useful fiction helped Lenin save political face. For the embarrassment Lenin was struggling to avoid there was ample warrant. In 1917 his moderate socialist critics had warned him that Russia was not yet ready for socialist revolution and that the attempt to force one would lead to disaster. Though Lenin acknowledged that the Russian proletariat was too weak alone to build socialism, he forged ahead anyway, confident that this weakness would be offset by aid from fraternal revolutionary regimes in Europe and from the semi-proletarian Russian peasantry. After the October Revolution, the Mensheviks continued to urge the Communists to moderate their policies. In particular, in their Party Program of 1919 and at the Eighth Congress of Soviets in December 1920 the Mensheviks recommended replacing requisitioning with free trade. 42 Lenin dismissed these suggestions, however, as attempts by accomplices of international imperialism to lead the peasantry astray into the camp of counterrevolution. 43 But after three years of trying to build socialism, Lenin had to back down and adopt as his own some of the proposals of these accomplices of international imperialism. Without help from the allies on whom he had banked, Lenin finally had to face the fact that the Russian proletariat was indeed too weak to build socialism. To avoid the fate of previous regimes, the Bolsheviks had to have peasant backing, and Lenin believed it could be obtained only by partially restoring free trade even though, as he acknowledged at the Tenth Party Congress, this was advocated also by the petty bourgeois counter-revolution. Little wonder, then, as he admitted, that his new policies occasioned some Muscovites to sneer and to say, See what communism has come to! 44
12 1 LCW, 23:297-308 (Lenin s emphasis). 2 On Stalin and Lenin in 1917 see Momos and the Mountain Eagle, chapters 8-16. 3 On the Mensheviks views, see Leopold Haimson, The Mensheviks (Chicago, 1974), 15-19, 34-35. 4 LCW, 23:299, 307-8, 330; 24:42-54. 5 LCW, 24:69, 97; 25:360-61; 26:172 (Lenin s emphases). 6 RDCPSU, 1:254-55. 7 LCW, 26:241-42. 8 LCW, 30:207-8. 9 See Momos and the Mountain Eagle, chapter 13. 10 LCW, 24:24. The 1903 Party Program is at RDCPSU, 1:39-45. 11 The 1919 Party Program is at RDCPSU, 2:54-73. 12 RDCPSU, 2:65. 13 See LCW, 27:90-91, 408, and 25:234, 427. 14 On GOELRO, see Edward Hallett Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, 3 vols. (New York, 1950-1953), 2:371-73, and Silvana Malle, The Economic Organization of War Communism 1918-1921 (Cambridge, 1985), 313-14. The VTsIK resolution is quoted from the extract in LCW, 32:138. In April 1919 the Ninth Party Congress seconded the call for a comprehensive national plan based on electrification. 15 LCW, 31:514-15. 16 LCW, 31:532-33. 17 SW, 5:224-25. 18 See Lars T. Lih, Bolshevik Razverstka and War Communism, Slavic Review 45 (1986), 673-88; Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, 2:147-72; and Malle, 322-457. 19 LCW, 31:515-16. 20 Leggett, 329. 21 LCW, 45:89. 22 Leon Trotsky, My Life. An Attempt at an Autobiography (New York, 1970), 463-64; Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, 2:280; and Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed. Trotsky, 1879-1921 (New York, 1954), 496-97.
13 23 Quotations are from statements on June 23, 1919 and March 6, 1920, in LCW, 29:378-80 and 30:412-13, respectively. See also 27:454; 28:142-43, 171-76, 340-45; 29:46, 77, 521-24, 567-70; 30:109-110, 135-36, 145-49, 183-84, and 237-38. 24 Lenin referred to the peasants legitimate rights in February 1920 (LCW, 30:377). 25 LCW, 42:230; Malle, 451. 26 LCW, 45:90; Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 2 nd ed. (New York, 1971), 211. 27 See Lenin s speeches at the Congress in LCW, 32:167-271; the resolution on the Tax in Kind in RDCPSU, 2:129-30; and the discussion by Paul Craig Roberts, War Communism : A Re-examination, Slavic Review 29 (1970), 238-61. 28 March 15 was the anniversary of Lenin s speech to the Water Transport Workers Union, as Stalin probably noted. 29 LCW, 32:222-23. 30 LCW, 32:219. 31 On the introduction of the NEP see Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, 2:280-359. 32 LCW, 32:224-25, 215. 33 LCW, 32:218-20. 34 LCW, 32:224. 35 LCW, 32:216-17. 36 LCW, 32:223-24. 37 LCW, 32:218-19. 38 LCW, 32:187 (also 189, 219-20, 233-34). 39 LCW, 32:265. 40 See especially Lenin s April 1921 pamphlet, The Tax in Kind, in which he first used the term, War Communism (LCW, 32:342-43). 41 LCW, 32:187-89. 42 Haimson, 237-38, and Abraham Ascher, The Mensheviks in the Russian Revolution (Ithaca, 1976), 113-14. 43 LCW, 30:412-13, and 31:519. 44 LCW, 32:185, 223.