The Great Terror

He had already remarked, to the delegates to the Party’s Xth Congress in March 1921, “We have failed to convince the broad masses.” He had felt obliged to excuse the low quality of many Party members: “No profound and popular movement in all history has taken place without its share of filth, without adventurers and rogues, without boastful and noisy elements…. A ruling party inevitably attracts careerists.”¹ He had noted that the Soviet State had “many bureaucratic deformities,” speaking of “that same Russian apparatus … borrowed from Tsardom and only just covered with a Soviet veneer.” And just before his stroke he had noted “the prevalence of personal spite and malice” in the committees charged with purging the Party.²

Soon after his recovery from this first stroke, he was remarking, “We are living in a sea of illegality,”³ and observing, “The Communist kernel lacks general culture”; the culture of the middle classes in Russia was “inconsiderable, wretched, but in any case greater than that of our responsible Communists.”⁴ In the autumn he was criticizing carelessness and parasitism, and invented special phrases for the boasts and lies of the Communists: “Corn-boasts and Corn-lies.”

In his absence, his subordinates were acting more unacceptably than ever. His criticisms had hitherto been occasional reservations uttered in the intervals of busy political and governmental activity. Now they became his main preoccupation. He found that Stalin, to whom as General Secretary he had entrusted the Party machine in 1921, was hounding the Party in Georgia. Stalin’s emissary, Ordzhonikidze, had even struck the Georgian Communist leader Kabanidze. Lenin favored a policy of conciliation in Georgia, where the population was solidly anti-Bolshevik and had only just lost its independence to a Red Army assault. He took strong issue with Stalin.

It was at this time that he wrote his “Testament.” In it he made it clear that in his view Stalin was, after Trotsky, “the most able” leader of the Central Committee; and he criticized him, not as he did Trotsky (for “too far-reaching self-confidence and a disposition to be too much attracted by the purely administrative side of affairs”), but only for having “concentrated an enormous power in his hands” which he was uncertain Stalin would always know how to use with “sufficient caution.” A few days later, after Stalin had used obscene language and made threats to Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, in connection with Lenin’s intervention in the Georgian affair, Lenin added a postscript to the Testament recommending Stalin’s removal from the General Secretaryship on the grounds of his rudeness and capriciousness—as being incompatible, however, only with that particular office. On the whole, the reservations made about Trotsky must seem more serious when it comes to politics proper, and his “ability” to be an administrative executant rather more than a potential leader in his own right. It is only fair to add that it was to Trotsky that Lenin turned for support in his last attempts to influence policy; but Trotsky failed to carry out Lenin’s wishes.

The Testament was concerned to avoid a split between Trotsky and Stalin. The solution proposed—an increase in the size of the Central Committee—was futile. In his last articles Lenin went on to attack “bureaucratic misrule and wilfulness,” spoke of the condition of the State machine as “repugnant,” and concluded gloomily, “We lack sufficient civilization to enable us to pass straight on to Socialism although we have the political requisites.”

“The political requisites…”—but these were precisely the activity of the Party and governmental leadership which he was condemning in practice. Over the past years he had personally lauched the system of rule by a centralized Party against—if necessary—all other social forces. He had created the Bolsheviks, the new type of party, centralized and disciplined, in the first place. He had preserved its identity in 1917, when before his arrival from exile the Bolshevik leaders had aligned themselves on a course of conciliation with the rest of the Revolution. There seems little doubt that without him, the Social Democrats would have reunited and would have taken the normal position of such a movement in the State. Instead, he had kept the Bolsheviks intact, and then sought and won sole power—again against much resistance from his own followers.

It is clear from the reports of the meeting of the Central Committee nine days before the October Revolution in 1917 that the idea of the rising was “not popular,” that “the masses received our call with bewilderment.” Even the reports from most of the garrisons were tepid. The seizure of power was, in fact, an almost purely military operation, carried out by a small number of Red Guards, only partly from the factories, and a rather larger group of Bolshevized soldiery. The working masses were neutral.