The great socialist experiment in Russia, which lasted some 70 years, seemed to prove the old saying that communism is only good in theory. However, at its most critical moment, after
the soviet victory in the Russian Civil War, the movement's most
vital piece was lost. Lenin, the professional revolutionary, the
orator, the instigator, the tactician, the brilliant Marxist scholar
died at the age of 53, after two years of declining physical and
mental heath on January 21, 1924. During those last two years, he
suffered three strokes and was therefore obviously extremely limited,
prompting him to promote Joseph Stalin, not true Marxist scholar Leon
Trotsky, to General Secretary. Though Lenin attempted to remove
Stalin before his death, the new communist leader had already grown
to powerful. It was at this point that the USSR drastically altered
their approach towards communism and consequently forever changed its
understanding. Although Lenin certainly used violence in securing his
revolutionary state, most notably the Red Terror and War Communism,
he nevertheless truly believed in raising Russia to a utopian society
where the government would famously “wither away,” leaving only
socialist ideology to rule. Where Lenin created an authoritarian
dictatorship, declaring a “vanguard of the party” necessary, he
did so in order to consolidate Soviet power during the civil war and
lead the uneducated, apolitical masses of Russia towards equality.
Stalin on the other hand saw these foundations of totalitarian rule
as a political end in itself in order to ultimately create a dominant
political and militant force within the international world ruled by
him.
Lenin dedicated his entire life to Marxist teachings and socialist revolution. After being imprisoned and later
exiled at the end of the 19th
century, he did nothing but work towards the development of a
worldwide socialist movement. Upon returning to Russia during the
1905 revolution, the young ideological Lenin saw his window of
opportunity to initiate his life's work. After years of squabbling
amongst the different factions of the Russian Soviet Congress, which
Lenin saw as weak and not progressive enough, the Soviets officially
took control of the Russian Government on October 25, 1917. Though
this negated any hopes for a more democratic multi-party system by
effectively establishing a foundation for a dictatorship, Lenin saw
it as a necessary step in order to fully achieve his socialist goal.
The Menshevik and Social Revolutionary parties would not aggressively
implement the radical reform Lenin demanded. Therefore he stated at
the Central Committee, “the masses have given the Bolsheviks their
trust and demand from them not words but deeds, decisive polices both
in fight against the war and in the struggle with economic
dislocation” (Suny, 1998, 53). With one bold strike Lenin seized
the government and put himself in a position to delineate the
direction of the socialist movement within his beloved Russia.
However, while this was a major step for Lenin, the next four years
of civil war would significantly demoralize this greatly ideological
man.
Despite, or possibly because Lenin was so strongly ideological, he was incredibly driven as well as practical.
As he slowly took control of the government he soon realized the huge
strides the country had to make if they were to successfully
transition to communism. For starters, the counter-revolutionary
movements on the fringes of the country were still a considerable
threat due to the frailty of the young Bolshevik government. Secondly
the country was famously backwards, undeveloped, and agriculturally
based, filled with uneducated and politically ignorant peasants,
especially after the government's removal of bourgeois and
upper-class participation in politics. If Lenin was going to succeed,
he needed to forcefully alter the economic base as well as the
culture within the country. It was at this point that Lenin made a
major break with this beloved Marxist thinking, declaring a vanguard
of the party be created in order to lead the Russian people towards
socialism without the hindrance of any opposing political ideology.
In doing so he created a new center of power in the communist state,
the Politburo, which was made up of the five most senior party
members; Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Kamenev, and Krestinkii. Instead of
a representative, bottom up government as socialist ideology
outlines, Lenin effectively created a top down government where the
local soviet administrative organs became an office for one-party
policy implementation. As the counter revolutionary groups gained
strength on the outskirts of Russia proper, the need for Lenin to
enforce party discipline and reprimand dissenters grew exponentially.
It was during this time of Soviet consolidation of power that Lenin
employed War Communism and the Red Terror. At this time Lenin stated
“whoever is not for us is against us” (Suny, 1998,125) and
gradually began to tighten his authoritarian grip over all of Russia
eliminating any party opposition, through denying freedom of speech
and freedom of press under the stipulation that they were “another
weapon” of the bourgeoisies (Suny, 1998, 126). During the years of
the Civil War Lenin managed to manipulate power into his own hands,
away from the workers and legitimize a centralized party rule over
the state.
However despite these rather harsh measures taken by Lenin during the Civil War, his actions following its
conclusion, in 1921, spoke to his determination in creating a truly
equal society. First off he created the New Economic Policy, or the
NEP, which allowed for some privatization and free trade within
Russia. Lenin realized that the first few years of Soviet rule had
not lived up to its promises stating, “Russia emerged from the war
in a state that can be likened to that of a man beaten to within an
inch of his life” (Suny, 1998, 137). Therefore Lenin, very
practically, made major concessions to his ideologies in order to
save his dream of true socialist revolution. No one was more aware of
these digressions than he, yet he was always ready with an answer for
their implementation. In this regard, he argued,
“there is no doubt that in a country where the overwhelming majority of the population consists of small
agricultural producers, a socialist revolution can be carried out
only through the implementation of a whole series of special
transitional measures which would be superfluous in a highly
developed capitalistic countries… it will take generations to
remold the small farmer, and recast his mentality and habits. The
only way to solve this problem of the small farmer - to improve, so
to speak, his mentality- is through the material basis, technical
support, the extensive use of tractors and other farm machinery and
electrification on a large scale” (Suny, 1998,137).
Ultimately the NEP was a way to help the impoverished peasants, allowing them to sell all of their excess
grain. It was under this policy that the living standards slowly
began to rise for the proclaimed backbone of Russia, the workers and
peasants, and the socialist light began to shine through the dark
misery of the pervious years.
However, just as life began to improve for the Russian people, Lenin's health declined and Stalin rose to power.
Unlike Lenin, however Stalin was never expertly versed in socialist
ideology. In fact he had only been a member of the Bolsheviks since
1903, after having read some of Lenin's work following his expulsion
from seminary school. Even after joining the ranks of the Bolsheviks,
Stalin acted as a party operative involved within the illegal, often
violent party committees, rather than as a political activist. By
1922 he had worked his was up the party ranks and was elected to
General Secretary. By the time of Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin was
the only party leader to be a member in all three of the highest
political institutions, the Politburo, Orgburo, and Central Committee
(Suny, 1998, 146). He used this position to consolidate his own power
within the inner workings of the party and insulate himself from
political rivals, especially that of Trotsky.
Once he had consolidated his position a top the communist party, Stalin took the revolution into his own hands and
began to drastically change its direction. Most notably he dropped
any aspirations for worldwide revolution and instead began to focus
on a policy known as socialism in one country, which depended on
drastically improving the country's industrial output (Suny, 1998,
140). Riding off the success of Lenin's NEP policies, in 1926 the
economy reached its pre-WWI industrial levels (Suny, 1998, 157). At
this point, when the economic situation was improving, Stalin
appeared to be a moderate and levelheaded leader. However this
economic success was mostly due to the fact that the old pre-war
factories, which had been decimated during the Civil War, were put
back into use. However, once this economic honeymoon ended, after a
poor harvest in 1927, the somewhat inflated industrial growth was
exacerbated, as the old factories could not continue to raise the
industrial production level without further investment. However, in
the midst of a poor harvest, the government had very little grain to
sell abroad while still providing food for the workers and soldiers
(Suny, 1998, 158). This crisis brought Stalin face to face with
failure and ultimately caused Stalin to revert to extreme measures of
a very anti-socialist nature.
In response to the, once again, failing economy, Stalin removed himself, and consequently the government,
from the formerly socialist, pro-peasant stance of the communist
party and directly blamed the local governments for their policies
failures (Suny, 1998, 225). Due to the poor state of the economy,
farmers were hoarding grain because of its low market price and
therefore Stalin instituted his policy of collectivization in the
infamous the Five-year plans (Suny, 1998, 168). He saw the peasantry
as unreliable section of the country and a potential capitalistic
threat to the Soviet Union in the face of rapid industrialization. To
counteract this, Stalin first ordered forced requisitions of grain
from the peasants in 1918 and 1929 as a supposedly temporary
emergency measure to boost the productivity of the industrialization
process in the cities. Next came a phase known as “dekulakization”
where the wealthy peasant class were exported, exiled, or executed
from 1929-1930. Finally, around the same time the forced
collectivization of all agriculture was put into practice. This
collectivization ultimately had dire effects for the peasantry; there
was widespread famine due to the constant transport of grain into the
industrial centers, elimination of equal wages, uninterrupted work
policy, and internal passports. One immigrant in 1933 wrote “here
on the collective farms I am living the life of a badly fed animal. I
have been robbed of my grain and all my reserves. My cattle have been
taken… Life is impossible. I go into town, get a job as a workman,
and there will be fed” (Suny, 1998, 242). All of this was supposed
to reign in production by limiting the peasant's ability to move as
well as their workers rights, essentially robbing the peasants of
their grain in order to trade abroad and provide the industrial
workforce with food. This maneuver was entirely against all socialist
ideals, Marxian or even Leninism's revised ideology. Lenin said “the
transition to collective cultivation must be carried out by the
proletarian state power with the utmost caution and gradualness, by
force of example, without the slightest constraint on the middle
peasantry” (Suny, 1998, 222). Lenin was in fact right as these
polices gave little reprieve to the ailing peasantry and in fact
created a disconnected and discontented populace. In addition this
created great upheaval within the upper echelons of Soviet power,
most notably Bukharin, who favored more conservative economic reform
more in line with the NEP. It was at this point that Stalin began to
systematically remove any and all suspected opposition.
The beginning of this forced removal of opposition is characterized by an incident in 1928 known as the
Shakhty Trial. This involved a group of engineers who had ties with
their former owners and disagreed with Stalin's policy of rapid
industrialization, were accused of sabotaging party rule at a certain
coalmine, put on trial and either executed, jailed, or deported. This
public show trial reminded the Russian people of the consequences
that come with crossing the state and set the stage for what would be
known as the Great Terror (Suny, 1998, 235). Throughout the 30's
Stalin used violence to impose subordination and strict discipline,
but as the decade moved on and increasing amounts of resources were
needed to continue to grow the economy, the violence was ever
expanded. Spanning from 1936 through 1938 the violent coercion that
had progressively grown throughout the 1930's reached its peak. As
the trial, which lead to the execution of two close advisors to
Stalin illustrated, even highly ranking party officials were not safe
from the suspicious eyes of Stalin. Any person suspected of any form
of opposition or the slightest dissent were either exiled, put to
work in labor camps, or merely executed (Suny, 1998, 263). It has
been estimated that Stalin killed some ten to eleven million people
throughout the 1930's. This massive loss of life obviously had
terrible consequences for the country (Suny, 1998, 266). Not to
mention, Stalin had successfully eliminated all forms of resistance
and created a new elite class that was totally subordinate, allowing
him to rule unquestioned until his death in 1954.
Although Stalin did manage to develop Russia's industrial base and raise Russia to the status of an international
superpower, he did so at great expense to the Russian people who had
entrusted the Soviet powers to lead them towards a better, more
equal, and fair society. Lenin was faced with huge obstacles in
consolidating and legitimizing Soviet power being entrenched in WWI
and the Russian Civil War simultaneously. When the
counter-revolutionaries threatened to overthrow the young Bolshevik
government before they could even attempt a socialist revolution,
Lenin was forced to take drastic measures and temporarily neglect the
needs of the peasants in implementing War Communism. However, once
the war was over, and power consolidated, he immediately turned a
helping hand to the peasants by implementing policies like the NEP,
relaxing the socialist ideology, allowing bourgeois specialists to
work within the government, and even began to open boarders to
foreign investment. For, Lenin, unlike Stalin quickly realized the
transition to communism would take years due to the state of the
peasantry. Stalin completely disregarded the livelihood of the
peasants as well as socialist ideology in everyway. He exploited the
legitimacy of the Soviet government that Lenin built as well as the
trusting Russian-soviet workers in order to develop a dominant
military state under his rule.
Works Cited
Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Soviet Experiment; Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States.
New York: Oxford University, 1998.
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