Titans of History

Lenin cared little for the arts or personal romance: his wife, the stern, bug-eyed Nadya Krupskaya, was more manager and amanuensis than lover, but he did engage in a passionate affair with the wealthy, liberated beauty Inessa Armand. Once in power, Lenin indulged in little flings with his secretaries—at least according to Stalin, who claimed Krupskaya complained about them to the Politburo. But politics was everything to Lenin.

During the 1905 Revolution, Lenin returned to Russia; but the Bolshevik uprising in Moscow was suppressed by Tsar Nicholas II and Lenin had to escape back into exile. Desperately short of money and always pursuing factional ideological feuds that split the party further, Lenin used bank robberies and violence to fund his small group. During these escapades, Stalin caught Lenin’s eye and he consistently promoted him even when other comrades warned him of Stalin’s violent propensities: “That’s exactly the sort of person I need!” he replied. By 1914 the Bolsheviks had almost been crushed by the tsarist secret police, and most were in exile or prison: as late as 1917 Lenin—who spent the war in Cracow, then Switzerland—was wondering if the Revolution would happen in his own lifetime.

But in February 1917 spontaneous riots brought down the tsar. Lenin rushed back to Petrograd (St. Petersburg), invigorated the Bolsheviks into an energetic radicalism, and through his own personal will created a program that promised peace and bread, and so popularized his party. Despite huge opposition from his own comrades, Lenin—backed by two gifted radicals, Trotsky and Stalin—forced the Bolsheviks to launch the October coup that seized power in Russia and changed history.

From the moment Lenin took power as premier—or chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars—the new Soviet Republic was threatened on all sides by civil war and foreign intervention. Lenin made peace with Germany at Brest-Litovsk and introduced the New Economic Policy to encourage some un-Marxist free enterprise, but pursued victory in the Russian Civil War with war communism, brutal repression and deliberate terror. “A revolution without firing squads is meaningless,” he said. In 1918 he founded the Cheka, the Soviet secret police, and encouraged pitiless brutality. Between 280,000 and 300,000 people were murdered under his orders; this only came to light when the archives were opened in 1991. “We must … put down all resistance with such brutality that they will not forget it for several decades,” he wrote.

After Lenin himself was shot and almost killed in an assassination attempt in August 1918, the Red Terror against all those considered enemies of the people—such as the kulaks (wealthy peasants), was intensified. His most energetic and talented protégés, Stalin and Trotsky, were also the most brutal. When the peasantry opposed his policies and millions perished in famines, Lenin said, “Let the peasantry starve.”

The following order, issued in 1918, is typical:

Comrades! The insurrection of five kulak districts should be pitilessly suppressed.

The interests of the whole revolution require this because the last decisive battle with the kulaks is now under way everywhere An example must be demonstrated.

1. Hang (and make sure that the hanging takes place in full view of the people) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers.

2. Publish their names.

3. Seize all their grain from them.

4. Designate hostages in accordance with yesterday’s telegram. Do it in such a fashion that for hundreds of kilometers around the people might see, tremble, know, shout: they are strangling and will strangle to death the bloodsucking kulaks.

Telegraph receipt and implementation.

Yours, Lenin.

PS: Find some truly hard people.