A people's tragedy

Lenin’s brain was removed from his body and transferred to the Lenin Institute. There it was studied by a team of scientists, charged with the task of discovering the ‘substance of his genius’. They were to show that Lenin’s brain represented a ‘higher stage of human evolution’. It was sliced up into 30,000 segments, each stored between glass plates in carefully monitored conditions, so that future generations of scientists would be able to study it and discover its essential secrets. The brains of other ‘undisputed geniuses’ — Kirov, Kalinin, Gorky, Mayakovsky, Eisenstein and Stalin himself — were later added to this cerebral collection. They formed the beginnings of the Institute of the Brain, which still exists in Moscow today. In 1994 it publicized its final autopsy on Lenin: his was a perfectly average brain.51 Which just goes to show that ordinary brains can sometimes inspire extraordinary behaviour.

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What would have happened if Lenin had lived? Was Russia already set on the path of Stalinism? Or did the NEP and Lenin’s last writings offer it a different departure? Historians should not really concern themselves with hypothetical questions. It is hard enough to establish what actually happened, let alone to prophesy what might (or in this case might not) have happened. But the consequences of Lenin’s succession are perhaps large enough to warrant a few words of speculation. After all, so much of the history of the revolution has been written from the perspective of what happened inside Stalin’s Russia that one may well ask whether there was any real alternative.

On the one hand it seems clear that the basic elements of the Stalinist regime — the one-party state, the system of terror and the cult of the personality — were all in place by 1924. The party apparatus was, for the most part, an obedient tool in Stalin’s hands. The majority of its provincial bosses had been appointed by Stalin himself, as the head of the Orgburo, in the civil war. They shared his plebeian hatred for the specialists and the intelligentsia, were moved by his rhetoric of proletarian solidarity and Russian nationalism, and on most questions of ideology were willing to defer to their Great Leader. After all, they were the former subjects of the tsars. Lenin’s last struggle for the ‘democratic’ reform of the party was never likely to succeed in its attempt to change this basic culture. His proposed reforms were purely bureaucratic, concerned only with the reform of the internal structure of the dictatorship, and as such were incapable of addressing the real problem of the NEP: the strained political relationship between the regime and society, the unconquered countryside in particular. Without a genuine democratization, without a basic change in the ruling attitudes of the Bolsheviks, the NEP was always doomed to fail. Economic freedom and dictatorship are incompatible in the long term.

On the other hand, there were fundamental differences between Lenin’s regime and that of Stalin. Fewer people were murdered for a start. And, despite the ban on factions, the party still made room for comradely debate. Trotsky and Bukharin argued passionately with each other about the strategy of the NEP — the former favoured squeezing the foodstuffs from the peasantry whenever the breakdown of the market system threatened to slow down industrialization, whereas Bukharin was prepared to allow a slower pace of industrialization so as to maintain a market-based relationship with the peasantry — but these were still intellectual debates, both men were supporters of the NEP, and, despite their differences, neither would have dreamt of using these debates as a pretext to murder one another or to send their opponents to Siberia. Only Stalin was capable of this. He alone saw that Trotsky and Bukharin had become so blinded by their own political debates and rivalry that he could use the one to destroy the other.

In this sense Stalin’s personal role was itself the crucial factor — as was, by his absence, Lenin’s role as well. If Lenin’s final stroke had not prevented him from speaking at the Congress in 1923, Stalin’s name today would occupy a place only in the footnotes of Russian history books. But that ‘if’ was, if you will, in the hands of providence, and this is history not theology.

Conclusion