After his return to Russia on 16 April 1917, when he was whipping up a mood of frenzy, harnessing the masses’ impatience, promising peace and land in exchange for support for his party, Lenin bent every effort to turn that party into a combat organization, capable of seizing power. Soon after the February revolution, when all the ‘illegals’ emerged from hiding, he was still declaiming, ‘we will create our own party as before and we will definitely combine our legal and our illegal work’.17 This had nothing to do with socialism. The society which Lenin and his adherents began to build had to resort to unrestrained violence, in accordance with the leader’s views, in order to survive. As the highest principle of revolutionary development, the dictatorship trampled and subordinated everything to its own will. Having once espoused the idea of socialism in one country, Lenin pushed questions of morality well down the Bolshevik agenda. In May 1919 the Politburo gave routine authorization for a collection of valuable jewellery to be made available to Comintern. The list of this jewellery runs to many pages and is valued in many millions of roubles, with items marked ‘for England’, ‘for Holland’, ‘for France’, and so on.18 In November 1921 the Politburo unanimously rejected an appeal from a special commission for the improvement of children’s rations.19 The difficulties faced by the new regime do not justify the refusal to meet this need. While millions were dying of hunger and disease, the Politburo was lavishly disbursing tsarist gold to ignite revolution in other countries.
It is not difficult to find evidence in Lenin’s writings of the idea that the dictatorship of the proletariat is compatible with full democracy, as indeed Soviet propaganda insisted for decades. It is, however, hard to reconcile the idea with the practice, where it is difficult to understand what Lenin meant by democracy. How can the dictatorship of one class – or more accurately one party – be reconciled with the principles of people’s power, liberty and the equality of all citizens? It smacks of social racism. A letter from Lenin to the Bolsheviks in Penza, not far from Simbirsk, written in August 1918, illustrates this point:
Comrades! The kulak uprising in [your] five districts must be crushed without pity. The interests of the whole revolution demand it, for the ‘final and decisive battle’ with the kulaks everywhere is now engaged. An example must be made. 1) Hang (and I mean hang so that the people can see) not less than 100 known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers. 2) Publish their names. 3) Take all their grain away from them. 4) Identify hostages as we described in our telegram yesterday. Do this so that for hundreds of miles around the people can see, tremble, know and cry: they are killing and will go on killing the bloodsucking kulaks. Cable that you have received this and carried out [your instructions].
Yours, Lenin.
P.S. Find tougher people.20
Clearly, not all Bolsheviks were up to the task.
Even after this telegram, Lenin frequently discussed ‘democracy and the dictatorship’. It is, however, unclear what rôle democracy was to play. The document cited above is a total condemnation of Lenin’s ‘theory’ of socialist revolution. What did he mean by ‘100 known kulaks, rich men’? Who were these condemned individuals? Today we know them to have been the hardest-working, most capable of the peasantry. If the circumstances were invoked to justify the crime, then they could be invoked to justify anything at all. In what way were Lenin’s orders to ‘shoot on the spot’, ‘arrest or shoot’, ‘apply extreme revolutionary measures’, etc., preferable to the ‘Cossack whips’ and ‘bloody massacres’ of Nicholas II? Compared to the bestialities of the civil war, the tragedies of tsarist Russia pale into insignificance.
Nor was it the ‘iron logic’ of a revolution that had gone out of his control that forced Lenin to apply these monstrous methods. In an earlier time, from the peacefully ordered world of Geneva in October 1905, he wrote a series of articles for publication in St Petersburg which were in effect instructions for staging an armed uprising. One such, entitled ‘Tasks for the Ranks of a Revolutionary Army’, discusses ‘independent military actions’, as well as ‘managing crowds’. He recommended that ‘units arm themselves as best they can (with rifles, revolvers, bombs, knives, knuckledusters, sticks, paraffin-soaked rags, rope for rope-ladders, spades to dig barricades, gun-cotton, barbed wire, nails (to stop the cavalry) and so on and so forth)’. Places and people, even if unarmed, must be made ready ‘to throw stones down onto the troops and pour boiling water from top storeys, to throw acid over the police and steal government money’. It was, he wrote, of the utmost importance to encourage the ‘murder of spies, policemen, gendarmes, Black Hundredists’, while it would be ‘criminal’ to trust the ‘democrats’, who were only good at running a liberal talk-shop.21
Lenin’s ‘theory’ of revolution proposed nothing other than these inhuman terrorist methods. Even when Nicholas II published his Manifesto of October 1905, leading to the creation of the State Duma and possibly opening the way eventually to constitutional monarchy, and offering perhaps the chance of a move towards democracy, Lenin did not alter his position. To the tsar’s proposal to give ‘the population stable foundations of civic freedom on principles of true inviolability of the person, freedom of conscience, speech, assembly and union’, the Bolsheviks responded with a signal for renewed violence. Lenin called for ‘the pursuit of the retreating enemy’, an ‘increase in pressure’, while voicing his confidence that ‘the revolution will finish off the enemy and wipe the throne of the bloody tsar from the face of the earth’.22
The evolution of the Bolsheviks’ attitude to the Constituent Assembly of 1918 – the first such body to be elected on a fully democratic basis in Russia’s history – demonstrates their extreme pragmatism. As long as it appeared possible to exploit this nationwide institution in their own interests, Lenin had supported the idea of the Assembly. But as soon as the elections produced a Bolshevik minority, he abruptly changed course. An All-Russian Commission had been formed before the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 to manage the election, and when that seizure of power took place the Commission declared it ‘a sad event’ that would ‘bring anarchy and terror’.23 When the Commission declared that ‘it found it impossible to enter any sort of relations with the Council of People’s Commissars’, i.e. Lenin’s government,24 its members were arrested. On the orders of the Bolshevik leadership they were locked in an empty room in the Tauride Palace for four days without food or bedding, in the hope that they would ‘see sense’ and cancel the election. The election went ahead regardless.
Realizing that the new Assembly, in which they had won only a quarter of the seats, would not bow to them, the Bolsheviks simply dispersed it during the night of 6 January 1918, after its first and only day of existence. Since the overthrow of the tsar in February 1917, the revolutionary bodies, the workers’ strike committees, and the soldier’s and peasants’ representatives had been forming their own councils, or soviets, and through these had been applying pressure on the successor (Provisional) government to bring the war to an end and to introduce radical reforms. After seizing