Revolutions - 10.99- The Testament

Episode Date: June 1, 2022

It's a faaaaaaaaaaaaaaake.  

Hello and welcome to revolutions. Episode 10.99, The Testament. As he approached his 52nd birthday in the spring of 1922, Vladimir Iliuch Lennon was breaking down. The decades of stress, exertion, rage, passion, resentment, despair, fear, doubt, exaltation, and responsibility, and finally caught up with him. These decades passed in a succession of days and nights of obsessive, single-minded focus and relentless work, with the ever-present threat of arrest, execution, and assassination hanging over his head. Lenin was plagued through all these years by headaches and insomnia, exacerbated by a bitterly caustic disposition, and frequent bouts of rage,

his temper flaring beyond control at long-time enemies, supposed friends, this turn of events, that constant irritation. this was not a healthy lifestyle. Now, unlike many of his comrades, Zinoviev in particular, Lenin's unhealthy lifestyle was not defined by hedonistic vice. He wasn't a glutton, he exercised, rarely drank, and forbid people to smoke around him. It was instead defined by the monomaniacal drive

of a man who treated both his mind and his body as mere conduits for work, and of the megalomaniacal drive of a man who believed that if you wanted something, done right, you had to do it yourself. 20 years of life in the Revolutionary Underground, followed by five years as de facto dictator of a revolutionary state in constant violent turmoil, had taken its collective toll. In the spring of 1921, Lenin emerged from all those potentially cataclysmic stresses we talked about worn down to the breaking point, at which point he broke. In the summer of 1921, the inner circle of the Communist Party had to reckon with the fact that the

boss could no longer maintain a full workload. Aware that more than anyone, Lenin was the indispensable man of the revolution, his closest comrades in the Politburo, Zonoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, and Stalin demanded that he take a vacation. Ever, the workaholic, Lenin tried to put them off, but finally relented in August of 1921. He took a holiday out to the Gorky estate, a neoclassical country mansion about 10 kilometers south of Moscow. The estate had been expropriated after the Soviet government moved to Moscow and set it aside for Lenin. He had first used it to recuperate from Fanny Kaplan's assassination attempt in 1919. After that, he visited the mansion sparingly, spending most of his days and nights in the Kremlin

working, working, always working. But unbeknownst to Lenin, as he arrived for the extended holiday in the summer 1921, Gorky would more and more be his primary residence during the final two and a half years of his life. because this holiday didn't really help much. He returned to Moscow in October still unable to work full days, still plagued by headaches, insomnia, numbness in his extremities, and bouts of forgetfulness. In February 1922, he wrote to Clara Zetkin, Unfortunately, I am very ill.

My nerves are kaput. Among all the other things that needed to be dealt with in early 1922, the ongoing famine, the negotiations with the Germans that would lead to the Treaty of Rapalo, the conference of the three internationals, the upcoming trial of the SRs, and just generally trying to rebuild Russian society, Lenin also turned his attention to the state of the Communist Party. It was very clear he would not be around to manage things forever, and the party must be put on firm footing if the revolution was to survive his death. He was well aware of the fact that, at present, the Communist Party was not a gigantic popular

force drawing strength, power, and authority from some huge proletarian working class. In March 1922, Lenin wrote to Wieszlovanov, a future Soviet foreign minister, but at this moment, a younger communist, recently elevated to the Central Committee and made a non-voting member of the Politburo. If one does not wish to shut one's eyes to reality, one ought to admit that at present the proletarian character of the party's policy is determined not by the class composition of the membership, but by the enormous and undivided authority of that very thin stratum of members who might be described. as the party's old guards. This thin stratum, Lenin described, was composed of Bolshevik true believers, who, with a few notable exceptions like Trotsky, had joined the party long before 1917. They were a small group of professional revolutionaries turned state officials, who were now responsible for the success or failure of their vision of the revolution.

Lenin's great concern was that with so few truly reliable party leaders in charge of everything that personality conflicts, petty grudges, or personal beefs between just a small handful of those leaders would cascade into total political apocalypse. As Lenin said to Molotov, even the slightest dissension in this strata may be enough to weaken its authority to such an extent that they should forfeit their power of decision and become unable to control events. At all cost, therefore, it was necessary to maintain the solidarity of the old guard. Occupying a position, not unlike George Washington,

Lenin was the one guy in the party that every faction, click, and member listened to and respected. The danger of a fatal rift to the party after the bony hands of death removed the unifying lynchpin of Lenin was all too apparent. But though the pitfalls of having too few reliable leaders was obvious, the problem was not easily solved by throwing the doors open and inviting new blood into the ranks. As we've noted several times, when the Communist Party became the ruling party after 1917, membership in the party brought perks and privileges and a measure of security. Better food, better lodgings, better pay. All at a time of acute deprivation, scarcity, and chaos.

Naturally, this led to people joining the party who weren't even close to ideological true believers. They just wanted a steady job as a job as a job, clerk somewhere and access to the party commissary. And of course, pure self-interest could extend to shadier motives, the opportunity for graft, corruption, and abuse of power. To combat this and maintain the ideological purity of the party, they carried out periodic purges, internal reviews of members that culled out those who failed to meet some basic standards.

That quote I used from episode 10.86 about old Bolsheviks being terrified at being kicked out mainly because they would lose their right to reside in the National Hotel and other privileges connected with this, was in response to a 1919 purge that kicked out fully half the members of the party. In 1921, they conducted another review and expelled 200,000 people, about a third of the total party membership for various infractions like indolence, malfecent, or corruption, but now including past associations with the Mensheviks, SRs, and other rival parties as meriting expulsion. So, this was a struggle to strike a balance. between keeping the party open enough

so that minute differences between a handful of leaders couldn't wreck everything, but not so open that the communist vision was sacrificed to petty careerism. In an effort to bring some centralized regularity to the practical logistics of the party, Lenin initiated the creation of a new post called General Secretary of the Party. This was meant to be an administrative job,

accepting or rejecting members, hiring and firing staff, organizing meetings, planning Congress, dealing with the mountains and mountains of paper reports and communications. The Politburo and the Central Committee would still decide all matters of policy. The job of the General Secretary would be to ensure that policy was properly carried out. The post of General Secretary was specifically created for Stalin, who had proved his loyalty, determination, and administrative abilities to Lenin several times over, as both head of the Org Bureau and also head of a party branch called the Workers and Peasants

Inspectorate, which was tasked with overseeing the state civil service to prevent endemic sloth and corruption, which was reflecting badly on the Soviet state. At the 11th Party Congress in the spring of 1922, Stalin was appointed to this new position of General Secretary of the Communist Party. Nobody realized what a massive point of political leverage Stalin now controlled. Neither Lenin nor Stalin nor anyone else took this appointment to be an anointment of Stalin as heir apparent. There was no heir apparent, and if there was one, the betting money was still on Trotsky. Trotsky was by far the most famous party leader.

Ever since his explosive entrance onto the world stage during the October Revolution, when he, even more than Lenin, was the face of the Bolshevik party, Trotsky had been the most visible communist leader. He was the head of the Red Army during the 6th. of a war, he engaged in international diplomacy, he traveled extensively making speeches, writing articles, delivering radio addresses, reviewing military installations and economic development. Most people outside the inner circle of the Communist Party likely took it for granted that Trotsky was Lenin's successor. But inside the inner circle, it was a different matter.

To the real old-Gar Bolsheviks like Zinovian, Khamenev and Stalin, Trotsky was still a newcomer, a latecomer, who had joined them only after 15 years of trading insults and mutual denunciations. Their attacks on one another were a matter of public record. Now, ultimately, Trotsky had seen the light, and Lennon repeatedly impressed upon his comrades Trotsky's indispensability, but that only added to the personal grudges growing up amongst them. Precisely the grudges Lennon worried about. Meanwhile, in the spring of 1922, Lennon himself was growing sicker by the day, Eventually doctors imported from Germany surmised he may be suffering some kind of lead poisoning from the bullet still lodged in his neck from the assassination attempt by Fanny Kaplan.

So on April 23rd, 1922, the day after his 52nd birthday, Lenin underwent surgery to remove this bullet. The surgery itself was a success, but while he recovered from the procedure, the underlying condition it was meant to fix remained. because, as we now know, he wasn't suffering from lead poisoning, but instead from a disease that was absolutely wrecking his brain cells. Just about a month after the surgery, the first Great Hammer fell. While out at Gorky recovering from surgery, Lenin suffered a major stroke on the night of May 26, 1922. The result was partial paralysis on his right side, temporary loss of speech and motor functions, and severe lapses in memory. and cognitive ability. In the days that followed, he retained self-aware consciousness,

but was no longer able to do simple physical and mental tasks. When he found himself unable to perform basic arithmetic, Lenin issued his first of many requests that in the event of total paralysis, incapacitation, or mental degeneration, they administer cyanide. So while Russian media was consumed with the sensational trial of the SRs in the summer of 1922, the chairman of the people's commissars was out at Gorky, recovering from an undisclosed stroke.

After the first uncertain days when death did seem imminent, Lenin started to recover over the summer. By July he was allowed to have visitors and read newspapers again, although his closest comrades in the Politburo forbid him from doing any serious work in case it disrupted his recovery. They put newly minted General Secretary Stalin in charge of enforcing Lenin's isolation, tasked with keeping papers, callers, petitioners, and questions away, and preventing the workaholic Lenin from trying to do an end run around these precautions and resume an active schedule too soon. This latest assignment made Stalin one of Lenin's most frequent contacts during these final years,

and by design one of his only contacts during these final years, allowing Stalin to build an image of quite literally being Lenin's right-hand man with no one else even in the picture. Trotsky, meanwhile, stayed away, and not even once did he visit Lennon at the Gorky Estate. A mistake he would not be able to later undo when it came time for his final showdown with Stalin. Lennon, meanwhile, sought to balance the authority granted to Stalin by pressing Trotsky to become deputy chairman of the people's commissars. Now, there were a few deputy chairman already, but given Trotsky's stature, if he took the title, Deputy Chairman, it would be a clear public nod that Lenin believes, received, Trotsky was a viable successor. But rather than take this job, Trotsky refused it.

After being pressed to take it several times in 1922, Lenin finally offered it one last time in September, and Trotsky adamantly turned it down. Now, this somewhat inexplicable refusal to become deputy chairman of the people's commissars may have stemmed from Trotsky's unwillingness to take what he considered an inferior title, and it may also have been driven by the keen awareness that if he took the job, his personnel would be controlled by General Secretary Stalin, Trotsky's most persistent personal rival. But whatever the reason, it left Lennon disappointed, and Trotsky without a clear institutional claim to being Lennon's anointed heir. It was another mistake he would not be able to later undo. By the fall of 1922, Lennon had recovered more than anyone could have reasonably hoped

back in May, but was far from recovered back to his old strength. He would, in fact, never recover. cover his old strength. When the fifth anniversary of the October Revolution came round in November 1922, Lenin was unable to attend the celebrations. But he was able to make a few other public appearances, including a speech at the Bolshoi theater at the end of the month, lending hope that he was back to his old self. But one French communist in attendance said, those who were seeing him for the first time said this is still the same Lenin, but for the others no such illusion was possible. Instead of the alert Lenin they had known, the man before them now was strongly affected by paralysis. His features remained immobile. His usual simple, rapid, confident speech was replaced by a hesitant, jerky delivery.

Indeed, instead of marking his return, the speech at the Bolshoi theater would be among Lenin's final appearances in public. While residing in the Kremlin in mid-December 1922, Lenin suffered what was probably a series of small strokes that permanently ruined his ability to write. He could now only dictate to a small circle of secretaries headed by Krupskaya and Lennon's sister Maria, who oversaw his daily routine and took down his words in the limited time allotted to him by the doctors. After a series of small medical incidents, the second Major Hammer fell. On the night of December 22nd, Lenin suffered his second major stroke, leaving him totally paralyzed on his right side and severely limiting his ability to think and speak. But despite the second major medical catastrophe, Lenin was not done yet.

Though confined to a bed, he was alert enough to want to keep grappling with the political affairs of the day. Specifically, the political affairs of the day involved a highly complicated intra-party squabble over policy and personnel down in Georgia. I do not want to get bogged down in the details of the Georgian affair, as it is a very messy can of worms, but both sides in the controversy wanted Lenin's support. and Stalin, who definitely was on one of the two sides, was outraged to find Lenin's secretaries asking for a dossier compiled by rivals on the other side. In late January 1923, he and Krupskaya got into an argument over the phone where Stalin apparently berated her for breaching the health protocols

that were supposed to keep these kinds of controversies away from Comrade Lennon, though one suspects that was only partly why Lennon was so irritated, as he was definitely not a disinterested party in the Georgian affair. It is worth noting, however, that while controlling Lenin's access to information was obviously advantageous to Stalin, he also requested to be relieved of these duties on February 1st, because more than anything, it was turning out to be an annoying hassle. The Politburo, however, rejected his request and instructed Stalin to maintain his vigil over the chief. Still not fully recovered from the second stroke, the third hammer fell on the night of March 9, 1923.

A third major stroke laid upon Lennon the familiar litany of results. Total paralysis on the right side, complete loss of speech, mental confusion, and an inability to communicate. The inner circle of the party went into an acute state of emergency as they were justifiably afraid that this was it. Lenin is about to die and we're going to have to grapple with the fallout. And we've known, going back to the early days of the history of Rome, just how critical these moments of political succession are, especially when no heir has been named, and at the moment, no air has been named.

Lenin tried to hasten his own demise by once again demanding cyanide, but Stalin refused to carry out the instruction, and his comrades in the Politburo concurred that they should simply wait and see. So in March of 1923, Lenin was knocked totally out of commission on the eve of the 12th Party Congress. For one of the only times in his long tenure as leader of the party, Lenin would not be in attendance. But even in his absence, Lenin was the dominant personality. His oldest Bolshevik comrades, Zinoviev and Kamenev, both paid almost embarrassing honor to the great leader, setting the groundwork for what would become the cult of Lenin, where he was an embalmed relic

representing heroic revolutionary invalibility. Even absent the third stroke, though, Lenin was not going to be at the 12th party Congress. And the other members of the Politburo agreed that it was vital to show the delegates to the Congress nothing but ironclad solidarity from the leadership, preventing any of the various opposition factions from prying open an opportunity. This public solidarity would cover over widening personality conflicts among them, most especially surrounding Trotsky, who was increasingly critical of his comrades and, as a result, increasingly isolated. Trotsky had only a few true allies left in the Central Committee, and none at all in the inner circle of the Politburo. And with Stalin now serving as General Secretary of the Party, this was not going to change any time soon.

But for the moment, none of them saw a public rift for or against Trotsky as being in any of their interest. so they did indeed present a united front at the 12th party Congress. Trotsky agreed to mute his criticisms and to give no hint to opposition elements in the party that he might lead them against the old guard. Rising to speak on behalf of a motion confirming their unified solidarity, he said, I shall not be the last in our midst to defend this motion, to put it into effect and to fight ruthlessly against all who may try to infringe it. If, in the present mood, the party warns you emphatically about

things which seem dangerous to it, the party is right, even if it exaggerates, because what might not be dangerous in other circumstances must appear doubly and trebly suspect at present. Still inside the inner circle, Trotsky zealously defended the leadership's ability to be right no matter what, including the facts. This was a position Trotsky would support right up until the moment he realized he had been pushed out of the inner circle, whereupon he would begin to champion and those calling for more democratic openness inside the party. But he was not there yet. In exchange for not criticizing his fellow members of the Politburo at the 12th Party Congress,

Trotsky was allowed to present his pet economic theories as the official party line. This appears now to be quite literally academic, but Trotsky apparently considered a far more weighty proposition at the time. Most famously, he presented the new economic crisis facing Russia, which he dubbed the scissors crisis. The scissors crisis was not a shortage of scissors, although there probably was one, but rather an alarming divergence of prices for industrial goods

and prices for agricultural goods. Basically, with the industrial sector only partially rebuilt, the cost of producing goods and their resulting scarcity drove prices up, while a recent bountiful harvest, partly thanks to grain provided by the American Relief Administration, meant food prices were falling. Plotted on a graph, the diverging lines looked like a pair of open scissors. What it meant in practice was that even if the peasants sold all their surplus,

they would not have enough to buy any of the things they needed to buy. This might once again lead them to conclude that there was no point in producing surpluses, which was a major cause of the recent famine. Plus, it would prevent the industrial sector from generating enough revenue to drive further expansion. Trotsky's answer to this was to push for more rational planning inside the industrial sector while still operating inside the NEP framework. Not wanting to inflame the peasantry after several years of antagonism and famine, though, Trotsky called upon the working classes to bear the sacrificial brunt of policies

that would reduce the price of industrial goods, up to and including slashing their wages. He said, there may be moments when the government pays you no wages or when it pays you only half your wage, and when you, the worker, have to lend the other half to the state. So what we have here is Trotsky telling the industrial proletariat, whom the Communist Party is meant above all to represent, and who have spent the last several years getting absolutely hammered by scarcity, unemployment, and mistreatment, yeah, we need you to suffer some more for the good of the revolution. This was justified by noting that such imposed hardships were different from those imposed by bourgeois states, because the Communist Party was, after all,

the party of the workers, not the party of the bourgeoisie, and so really, this was the proletariat voluntarily imposing hardships upon itself. This was no doubt a great comfort to the working classes of Russia, especially since the leaders of the Communist Party had recently worked so hard to destroy the workers' opposition movement inside the party, which was specifically organized to look after the interests of the proletariat. During the period, immediately before and immediately after the 12th Party Congress, where Lenin's absence was so strongly felt, those closest to him suddenly began producing new pronouncements from the incapacitated leader. These pronouncements took the form of notes allegedly dictated back in late December 1922 and early

January 1923. The first set was produced on April the 16th while the 12th Party Congress was going on, and it was a sole-searching denunciation of great Russian chauvinism, coupled with a demand to treat minority nationalities with dignity, respect, and autonomy, which set him against centralizers in the party. Lenin openly worried that the terms of the newly created USSR would serve Russian interests at the expense of those nationalities. It is quite natural, the notes read, that in such circumstances, the freedom to secede from the Union,

by which we justify ourselves, will be a mere scrap of paper, unable to defend the non-Russians from the onslaught of that really Russian man, the Great Russian Chauvinist, in substance a rascal and a tyrant, such as the typical Russian bureaucrat is. There is no doubt that the infinitesimal percentage of Soviet and Sovietized workers will drown in that tide of chauvinistic Great Russian riffraff, like a fly-in milk. These notes on the nationalities also read, were we careful enough to take measures to provide the non-Russians with a real safeguard against the truly Russian bully? I do not think we took such measures, although we could and should have done so. Then Lenin took a direct shot at Stalin.

I think that Stalin's haste and his infatuation with pure administration, together with his spite against the notorious nationalist socialism, played a fatal role here. In politics, spite generally plays the basest of roles. And just to be clear, by nationalist socialism, we here mean those socialists who wanted to incorporate autonomy of nationalities into the system as opposed to pure centralizers who wanted to overthrow such national differentiations. So we are not talking about the national socialism that you might be thinking of. Now, in everything I'm about to say next, I have to say that I'm heavily influenced by the case Stephen Kotkin makes in his biographies of Stalin, that the providence of, of all of this miraculous dictation from Lenin is dubious at best. Unlike all the other dictation produced around the same time, the typed-up notes suddenly produced in the spring of 1923

do not have matching handwritten originals in the archives, nor do they bear Lenin's initials, which he typically used to mark that, yes, this was in fact coming from him. Other dictation from the same period has both of these markers of authenticity, but not these later documents that we are here talking, talking about. They were simply typed up and asserted to be Lenin's words. There is another curious example of this back in March just before Lenin's third stroke, where he apparently demanded Stalin apologize to Krupskaya for berating her over the phone that one time.

This document, too, lacks Lenin's initials and a handwritten original. A far more explosively than comments on the nationalities, in mid-May, Krupskaya produced Lenin's remarks on the advisability of expanding the ranks of the Central Committee to 50 or 100 members. This document, too, was allegedly dictated back in December 1922 just after Lenin's second stroke. The notes have no official title, but they later became known as Lenin's Testament, because in addition to his comments about the advisability of expanding the ranks of the Central Committee, he also made observations about several senior members of the party. The notes read, quote,

Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary General, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution. Comrade Trotsky, on the other hand, is distinguished not only by outstanding ability. He is personally perhaps the most capable man in the present central committee, but he has displayed excessive self-assurance and shown excessive preoccupation with purely administrative side of the work. Of his oldest comrades, Lenin said only, the October episode with Zinovyev and Kameneff was of course no accident,

but neither can the blame for it be laid upon them personally, any more than non-Bulshivism can be upon Trotsky. As Kotkin notes, this is an extremely backhanded absolution of Zinovief and Kameneff's opposition to the October Revolution, because though they were the oldest of the old guard, when that great test of October came, they both failed it miserably. He also mentioned two younger leaders, Nikolai Bukharin and Georgi Piottochoff. He said,

Bukharin is not only a most valuable and major theorist of the party, he is also rightly considered the favorite of the whole party. But his theoretical views can be classified as fully Marxist only with great reserve, for there is something scholastic about him. He has never made a study of the dialectics and I think never fully understood it. Piatokov is unquestionably a man of outstanding will and outstanding ability, but shows too much zeal for administrating and the administrative side of the work to be relied upon in a serious political manner.

Both of these remarks, of course, are made only for the present on the assumption that both these outstanding and devoted party workers fail to find an occasion to enhance their knowledge and amend their one-sidedness. None of this is exactly a ringing endorsement of any of the principal claimants to Lenin's mantle. And while Trotsky perhaps comes off the best as the most capable man in the present central committee, and Bucharan gets noted as the favorite of the whole party, neither is without their major faults. Lenin's former deviant menshevism was plainly noted, as was Bucharin's apparent immaturity. Then, to make sure there was no mistake, a further short addendum to this text,

allegedly dictated in the first week of January 1923, took dead aim at Stalin. Stalin is too rude, the addendum said, and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us communists, becomes intolerable in a secretary general. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead, who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite, and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc. This circumstance may appear to be a negligible detail, but I think that from the standpoint of safeguards against a split, and what I wrote above about

the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky is not a minor detail, but it is a detail which can assume decisive importance. Now, these explosive remarks were not like printed in Pravda or anything like that, but they landed like a bombshell inside the close-knit ranks of the inner party. With his practically dying breath, Comrade Lennon was saying, Get rid of Stalin. But the thing is, and here's where I'm following Kotkin, it's very likely Lenin didn't say any of this,

and that the little click of secretaries around him cooked these remarks up themselves, with Krupskaya as the most likely mastermind. She herself was staring down life without Lennon, and her own antagonistic relationship with Stalin may have led her to want to knock him down a peg or two, perhaps in favor of Trotsky, perhaps Zinoviev, perhaps Bukharan, anyone but Stalin.

But to be clear, this is all conjecture, based on the notable lack of evidence confirming that these notes were dictated when and where and by whom they were alleged to have been dictated. But whether they were actually Lenin's words or not, they were taken at the time and afterwards to be Lenin's words, and they caused an enormous amount of turmoil inside the inner party, inside that upper stratum that Lenin himself was so concerned might be destroyed by personality conflicts that would in turn destroy the entire revolution.

Next week, we will reach the final chapter of Lenin's life and the final chapter of our highly detailed accounting of the Russian Revolution, because I'm going to use that chapter to mark the end of the revolutionary age and the beginning of simply the early history of the USSR. are. The revolutionary work was of course not over, and there will be three more additional episodes that take us through the great purges in the 1930s. But the revolution would now be directed from above rather than from below. It would be a political, economic, and cultural revolution waged by a government instead of against a government. Lenin had managed to live long enough to see his revolution come to pass, and after many decades of relentless work, it is time to extinguish

his revolutionary torch.