A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

Stalin always portrayed his revolution as a continuation of the Leninist tradition, the belief that the party vanguard's subjective will and energy could overcome all adverse objective contingencies, as Lenin himself had argued during the October seizure of power. And in a way Stalin was correct. His drive towards industrialization, sweeping aside the market and the peasantry, was in essence no different from Lenin's own drive towards Soviet power which had swept aside democracy. One could argue that the command system was itself an inevitable outcome of the contradiction of October — a proletarian dictatorship in a peasant country — a contradiction with which Lenin himself came to grapple in his final tragic years. Soviet Russia's international isolation, which stemmed directly from October, and which as a result of Allied intervention in the civil war gave rise to xenophobic paranoia about Russia's 'capitalist encirclement', reinforced the argument of the Stalinists that the 'peasant-cart-horse pace' of industrialization favoured by Bukharin under the NEP would be much too slow for Russia to catch up with — and defend itself against — the West. The social isolation of the civil war regime, which stemmed equally from October, forced it to adopt the command system, which, although relaxed briefly in the 1920s, was almost bound to be taken up again in view of the party's problems with the peasantry and the growing reluctance of its rank and file to sacrifice the ideal of rapid industrialization to the market relationship with it. Finally, there was the problem of the party's culture which haunted Lenin in his final years. Having taken power in a backward country, its lower-class recruits were bound to lack the technical expertise to take over the running of the state and industry; and yet its rhetoric of equality which had attracted them to it in the first place was also bound to set them up in opposition to the 'bourgeois specialists' upon whom the party-state was forced to depend. The NEP in this sense was a precarious and perhaps impossible balance between the revolution's need to preserve the old culture and to learn from it — what Lenin called its 'school of capitalism' — and the proletarian initiative to destroy it which, more than anything else, lay at the heart of Stalin's cultural revolution.

* * * 'Russia has changed completely in the past few years,' wrote Prince Lvov to Bakhmetev in November 1923.

It has become a completely new Russia. The people and the power are, as usual, two different things. But Russia more than ever before belongs to the people ... To be certain, the government is hostile to the people and their national feelings, standing as it does for international goals, it deceives the people and turns them into slaves, but nonetheless it still receives the support of this oppressed and enslaved people. They would still defend

the regime if it was attacked by an intervention or by an organization within Russia fighting under the old slogans or in the name of a restoration ... The people supports Soviet power. That does not mean they are happy with it. But at the same time as they feel their oppression they also see that their own type of people are entering into the apparatus, and this makes them feel that the regime is 'their own'.

The Prince's recognition of the Soviet regime was an extraordinary volte-face for a man who only five years earlier had confidently told the US President that the Russian people would rally to the Whites. His mind had been changed by the Whites' defeat — a defeat which, as he now recognized, had been brought about 'by the choice of the people' — and by the introduction of the NEP, which in his view had satisfied the main demands of his beloved peasants. 'The land question', Lvov wrote to Bakhmetev, 'has still not been resolved, it will still give rise to bloody conflicts, but in the mind of the ordinary peasant it has been decided once and for all — the land now belongs to him.'

For the exiled Prince, living now in Paris, the revolution had come full circle. In 1923 he received a letter from Popovka in Russia telling him that the peasants had divided up the land of the Lvov estate. The same peasants who forty years before had helped the young Prince and his brothers to restore its run-down farm economy had now taken possession of the estate themselves. It would surely not be over-generous to assume that Lvov was not unpleased by this news. All of his long life in public service had been dedicated to the peasantry. Even now, in his final years, he commuted every day from his small apartment in Boulogne-sur-Seine into Paris, where he worked for a Russian aid committee that collected money for the victims of the famine and helped place Russian refugees. It was a sort of Zemgor in Paris.