Much surprised me when I first arrived in the Soviet Union as an idealistic but ill-informed grammar-school boy. The temperature of the Cold War was moving from deep freeze to tepid indecision, yet the country remained another world, where citizens were denied civil rights and Soviet television was still in thrall to Vladimir Lenin. Night after night he burst onto the screen. A choir of cute children sang the praises of the first Soviet leader – ‘We are all young Leninists! We dream that we will live and work as Lenin did! Our love is for him and for our homeland …’ It was disconcerting, reminiscent of the Christian hymns I had sung in my own childhood – just substitute Christ for Lenin. But how strange that a man who spent his days signing death warrants and inciting mass terror should be idolised as a kindly father figure for little children.
Then there was the grown-up version that blared from the radio with lyrics that reminded me of standing in the Kop at Anfield singing ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’. ‘Lenin is always with you,’ said the words of a show tune with swelling strings and a heldentenor hitting the top notes. ‘In grief, in hope and joy. Lenin is your springtime, Your every happy day. He’s in you and he’s in me … In every moment Lenin’s with us … bringing joy to the world.’
The overblown sentimentality of Lenin worship was the butt of jokes. My new Russian friends warned me we could never be alone, even in the most intimate moments, then burst into laughter as they explained that Lenin vsegda s nami – Lenin is always with us.fn1 But the saint-like personality cult was still taken seriously by the masses. For decades his image and words were glorified in films, songs and posters. A party that had destroyed religion in a deeply Christian country needed something to replace it in the people’s minds, and holy Lenin, dedicated, ascetical and self-denying, was in tune with the times.
The civil war had made the Bolsheviks a party of autocratic power, uninterested in debate or divergent opinions. They considered themselves a paramilitary fraternity surrounded by an untrustworthy population that must be re-educated to understand the new reality. To achieve their ends, the party’s leaders would need to steel themselves to be austere, disciplined zealots, untroubled by ordinary human emotions.
Lenin acknowledged that the fanatical Rakhmetov in Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? – the man who refused food and slept on a bed of nails to make himself tough – had been a role model for his own development. ‘I can’t listen to music1,’ Lenin said, ‘because it makes me want to say sweet, silly things, and pat people on the head … but you have to beat people’s heads, beat them mercilessly! … What a devilishly difficult job I have.’
Four years on from 1917, the revolution was still far from secure. When its leaders gathered in Moscow for what should have been the triumphal Tenth Party Congress in March 1921, they did so against a backdrop of menacing unrest. Peasant revolts, famine and strikes were crippling the Russian economy. The Petrograd workers, who’d been the touchstone of the February and October revolutions, were once again on the streets; but now they were marching against the Bolsheviks. The grievances listed in the workers’ strike declaration were an open protest against Communist repression:
We, the representatives2 of the factories and socialist parties in Petrograd, despite much that we disagree on, have united to pursue the following goals: overthrow of the Bolshevik dictatorship, free elections to the soviets, freedom of speech, press and assembly for all, and the release of political prisoners.
In a panic, the government declared martial law. Troops dispersed the strikers with rifle fire. But another, even more dangerous storm was brewing just outside Petrograd, and soon it would shake the regime to its foundations.
On a blustery autumn day, with a salty wind blowing in from the sea, I picked my way through a deserted warren of stone fortifications on an island in the Gulf of Finland. The crumbling walls and gun emplacements, now overgrown with weeds and creepers, are part of the fortress of Kronstadt, the former home of Russia’s Baltic fleet and first line of defence of St Petersburg, just 30 miles away over the chilly waters to the east.
After the February Revolution of 1917, the Kronstadt sailors rose up and murdered their tsarist officers; as the revolution’s shock troops, they fought with ferocious zeal and helped secure the Winter Palace in October. But by 1921, things had changed. Here in Kronstadt’s underground tunnels and on the cruisers and battleships lying at anchor, meetings were being held. The mood among the fortress’s 30,000 sailors was ugly, and their anger was directed against the Bolsheviks. The democracy of the Soviets had been crushed by a one-party, Communist dictatorship. The sailors sent a delegation to meet the Petrograd workers and heard tales of anger, despair and growing demands for direct action. A spokesman for the workers told them the people’s patience was close to breaking point:
Since you are from Kronstadt3, and you are the revolutionary sailors they threaten us with all the time, and you want to know the truth, well here it is: we are starving. We have no shoes and no clothes. We are physically and morally terrorised. Each and every one of our requests and demands is met by the authorities with terror, terror and yet more terror. Look at the prisons of Petrograd and you will see how many of our people are locked up in there. No, comrades! The time has come to tell the Communists openly: ‘You’ve done enough speaking on our behalf. We say, Down with your dictatorship which has driven us into this dead end! Now move over and make way for non-party men. Long live freely elected soviets! They alone can get us out of this mess!’
When the delegation returned to Kronstadt, mass meetings discussed how the sailors should respond to the crisis. There was resentment that Lenin’s call for ‘All Power to the Soviets’ had been replaced by an insistence on ‘All Power to the Bolsheviks’. In a mark of protest, 5,000 Kronstadt sailors burned their party cards. Their leaders drew up a manifesto claiming the Communists had ‘lost the trust of the people’ and demanding immediate concessions, including free elections open to all parties:
The working class expected the revolution4 to bring freedom, but it has brought enslavement whose horrors far exceed those of tsarism … The power of the monarchy, with its police and its gendarmerie, has passed into the hands of the Communist usurpers, who have given the people not freedom but the constant fear of torture by the Cheka … The Communists have inflicted moral servitude, too, even forcing the people to think the way they want them to … Through the state control of the trade unions they have chained the workers to their machines so that labour is no longer a source of joy but a new form of slavery. To the protests of the peasants, expressed in spontaneous uprisings, and those of the workers, whose living conditions have compelled them to strike, they have answered with mass executions and a bloodletting that exceeds even that inflicted by the tsarist generals. The Russia of the proletariat, the first to raise the red banner of liberation, is now drenched in blood.
When news of the manifesto reached Lenin at the Party Congress in Moscow, he understood the danger for the Bolsheviks. He sent Trotsky to Kronstadt with orders to crush the revolt.
On 8 March 1921, the day the Congress opened, with the sea still frozen solid, Bolshevik forces set out to march 5 miles across the ice. Trotsky’s artillery opened up from the shore, but the Kronstadt sailors were ensconced in fortified pillboxes. I found them still standing on the water’s edge. From inside I could see how the rebel gunners had the advancing Bolshevik troops firmly in their sights, exposed and visible for more than a mile, with nowhere to hide on the inhospitable ice. With a withering barrage of fire, the sailors mowed down thousands of Red Army men and forced the rest to retreat. The Bolsheviks were staring disaster in the face.
But Trotsky was merciless. A week later, he gathered 45,000 fresh troops and lined up machine-gunners to fire on any who refused to go into action. Around 300 delegates from the Party Congress volunteered to come to help with the assault. This time Trotsky’s forces gained a foothold around Kronstadt and, after 24 hours of bloody fighting, with Red Army losses reaching nearly 10,000 men, the fortress fell to the Bolsheviks. Many of the rebels escaped across the ice to Finland, but 15,000 were taken prisoner, to face immediate execution or a lifetime in the camps. Lenin denounced the Kronstadt sailors as ‘White traitors’, and rushed in extra bread supplies to calm the angry public.
The immediate crisis was over, but Kronstadt was a warning that Lenin could not ignore. It gave a focus to the anger of workers and peasants, who felt the Bolsheviks had robbed them of the fruits of the revolution. A peasant uprising in Tambov reached its height just as the sailors of the Kronstadt naval base were mutinying. Lenin admitted the Bolsheviks were ‘barely hanging on’. He told the opening session of the Tenth Party Congress that the peasant wars and the Kronstadt revolt were ‘far more dangerous than5 all the Denikins, Yudeniches and Kolchaks put together’. The people were sick of his repressive War Communism, weary of hunger and economic meltdown, no longer willing to suffer in the name of some future Utopia. Military force and mass terror were no longer enough to keep the lid on; Lenin needed a different, longer-term solution.
The solution Lenin proposed to the Party Congress just days after the Kronstadt rebellion was the New Economic Policy – the NEP. It would soften the dictatorial control of the state, and reintroduce some elements of capitalism to try to improve the nation’s disastrous economic conditions: ‘The New Economic Policy we are introducing6 today is a substantial one. It will last for a long time,’ Lenin famously promised. ‘Comrade peasants! Today we announce openly, honestly and with no deception: in order to maintain the march towards socialism, we are making a whole series of concessions to you … There will be limits, but you will be told what these are so you can judge for yourselves …’
Lenin’s ‘concessions’ included an end to the hated practice of grain seizures by the state, which had sparked bloody resistance and a collapse in Russian agriculture. Now, in return for handing over a fixed portion of their produce, peasants would be allowed to sell the rest for their own profit. Unsurprisingly, harvest yields rocketed.
In industry, too, some private enterprise was to be permitted, with cooperatives or trusts allowed to make money for themselves instead of for the state. Aid and investment would be sought from abroad, and better international relations would reduce the isolation Russia had suffered since 1917. Banks, military production and strategic industries would remain in state hands, but a mixed economy would be tolerated in most other sectors. Small-scale and light industries would be entrusted largely to the hands of private cooperatives.
It was the only way to placate the people. But it was an ideological bombshell and it split the party. Many Bolsheviks saw the NEP as a betrayal. The weakening of the state, the reversion to capitalist methods were perceived as a travesty of Communist ideals, a capitulation to the bourzhoui. Even Vladimir Mayakovsky, the Bolsheviks’ fiery, semi-official poet, lampooned the NEP in verse:
They asked me if I love7 the NEP.
I said I do,
when it’s not so darned absurd.
Come on, comrades!
Get out there
And slug it out with the merchants …
Lenin says it’s ‘here for good’:
But who knows?
Another revolution could be along soon …
But the New Economic Policy was a great success. Within a few years, agriculture and industry were back to their pre-war levels, with improved living standards that deflated much of the popular anger against the regime. Limited private enterprise spurred the Russian people to work harder in pursuit of personal gain. The peasants produced more food because they knew it was in their interest to do so.
The NEP averted the threat of a counter-revolution and consolidated the Bolsheviks’ hold on power. But Lenin never really liked it. For him it was a strategic retreat, a necessary trick to preserve Communist rule on the way to true socialism. He undoubtedly sympathised with the hardliners who resented its elements of renewed dalliance with capitalist methods. But he also knew that he had to push it through. With the NEP arousing fierce debate in the party, he moved decisively to crush all opposition to it, and to the authority of the party leadership. On the same day the NEP was announced and the revolt in Kronstadt was finally defeated, Lenin presented a motion to the Congress demanding party unity. ‘There must be an immediate dissolution8 of all dissenting groups that have been formed on the basis of some platform or other,’ it said. ‘Failure to comply with this Congress resolution will result in unconditional and immediate expulsion from the party.’
The ‘On Party Unity’ motion was carried, and it would have fateful consequences. The remaining elements of pluralism within the party were swept away. From now on debate would be stifled and any challenge to the leadership would be denounced as treacherous ‘factionalism’, a tactic Josef Stalin would later exploit to establish his dictatorial hold on power. The motion paved the way for the intolerant, monolithic Communist Party that would rule the country for the next 70 years.
Lenin was acutely aware that even limited reform runs the risk of unleashing demands for more. So he accompanied the concessions of the NEP with a crackdown on dissent that included show trials of political opponents and deportations of the Russian intelligentsia, beginning in 1922.
Like Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, or China today, Lenin pulled off the feat of liberalising the economy without loosening the grip of the political dictatorship (something Mikhail Gorbachev would signally fail to do 60 years later, with serious consequences for himself and his party).fn2 The NEP offered breathing space, giving Lenin the time he badly needed to consolidate the Bolsheviks’ hold on power. But if 1921 marked an upswing in the party’s political health, Lenin’s own was becoming increasingly fragile.
fn1 Another take on the same joke was that ‘in the USSR you can’t buy double beds, only triple beds’!
fn2 It is clear that the model for Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms was at least in part the New Economic Policy of the 1920s. For both Lenin and Gorbachev, it was the threat of economic collapse that made them experiment with capitalism. And in both cases the experiment transformed society. The NEP and perestroika both created a new class of speculators – the so-called NEP men in the 1920s and the oligarchs in our own time – who grew rich from exploiting the new economic freedoms. Both were reviled by the rest of the population, both had a reputation for the tasteless flaunting of personal wealth, and both represented a threat to the survival of the Communist system. I believe that Gorbachev, like Lenin, saw economic liberalisation as a means to preserve and strengthen socialism, but – unlike Lenin – he failed to impose the political tightening that would stop change spiralling out of control and ultimately destroying the system it was designed to save.