Lenin’s overriding obsession with a worldwide chain reaction of revolution in one country going viral and infecting the whole world took precedence over domestic Russian issues even during the civil war phase of the revolution. As early as 26 December 1917 Izvestiya announced that Sovnarkom had made an allocation of 2 million roubles to ‘foreign representatives of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs for the needs of the international revolutionary movement.’196 It was a declaration of war on the capitalist democracies to realise a worldwide ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ achieved by another invention of his, ‘revolutionary morality’, which meant:
[Resorting] to all sorts of cunning schemes and stratagems, to employ illegal methods, to evade and conceal the truth, in order to penetrate into the [foreign] trade unions, to remain in them and to conduct the Communist work in them at all costs. The struggle against [personalities and parties] of similar social type as our Mensheviks … must be waged without mercy, in the same manner as we have done it in Russia until all the incorrigible leaders of opportunism and of social chauvinism have been completely discredited and expelled from the trade unions.197
In a sense, the mission entrusted by Lenin to Béla Kun in Hungary was a trial run, for in the very month of March 1919 when Kun was proclaiming the Hungarian Soviet Republic in bloodshed and chaos, Lenin also inaugurated what seemed a brilliant way of instigating, assisting and controlling Communist revolutions outside Russia.198 By careful manipulation, the bickering Socialist International was fatally weakened by being split into two opposing groups: parties which had supported their governments’ war efforts versus those who had not. On 2 March 1919, Lenin made that organisation irrelevant by opening the First Communist International, abbreviated with his personal penchant for jargon, acronyms and neologisms to ‘Comintern’. He chose the moment when only nineteen foreign parties had representatives in Moscow to approve or reject his ground rules, which suited him well. At the second Comintern congress in 1920, attended by delegates from thirty-seven countries, Lenin imparted the rules for Comintern members, the most important of which was his doctrine of ‘democratic centralism’.
Like most of the dialectic, the term was defined as meaning the opposite of what it appeared to mean. ‘Democratic’ meant that each Moscow-approved party could send delegates to the Comintern meetings, provided they conformed to twenty-one conditions laid down by Lenin, which required them to model their structure on disciplined lines in conformity with the Soviet pattern and to expel all moderate socialists and pacifists, especially those who rejected violent tactics and Lenin’s dictatorship. Whatever the believers wanted or pretended to believe, the Comintern was thus not a vehicle of international socialism, but a weapon of Russian foreign policy, which, throughout its 1,000 years of recorded history, was a process of continuous expansion. The catch, in any case, was that the approved foreign parties would have voting rights in the Comintern ‘democratically’ – which was defined as meaning in proportion to the size of their membership. Since the Russian Party was by far the largest, due to the many Soviet citizens who were obliged to join, it could always out-vote all the others, whose membership was voluntary, yet were bound to accept this ‘democratic’ majority vote. ‘Centralism’ actually meant from the top: Comintern headquarters were in Moscow and all power between the meetings lay with the permanent staff, controlled directly by the Kremlin.
With another touch of the political sleight of hand that confused many foreign observers as yet unaccustomed to Soviet double-talk, the 8th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in March 1919 followed orders from the top to ‘instruct’ the Central Committee – usually referred to as ‘Tseka’, an acronym of its Russian title tsentralny komityet – to elect from its ranks a policy organ or Politburo of five members. Stalin was quietly gathering the reins of power into his hands while Lenin and Trotsky circled warily round each other politically, the advantage lying gradually with Trotsky as Lenin became more and more incapacitated with Kaplan’s bullet or bullets, still lodged in his neck. The other two original Politburo members were Lev Kamenev, married to Trotsky’s sister, and Nikolai Krestinsky. After Lenin’s death, Stalin would murder Trotsky, Kamenev and Krestinsky because they knew too much about his past.
The declared justification of the Politburo was that questions of state too urgent to await the next meeting of the Central Committee needed to be resolved by a small permanent executive on a day-to-day basis. Effectively, the Central Committee thus became a rubber stamp for Politburo decisions, and so on down the line. Nobody in Russia now chanted ‘All power to the soviets!’ for the role of soviety was reduced to knee-jerk endorsement of orders from above on pain of imprisonment or worse. Because the party secretariat controlled the agenda of all meetings and also transmitted Politburo decisions to the rank-and-file, a critical post in this concentration of power was that of otvetsvenny sekretar – or responsible secretary. In 1922, when this post was translated into that of general secretary of the CPSU, abbreviated to Gensek, its first holder was Josef Stalin, who thereby became the Politburo’s most influential member.
With at least 10 million people having died violently or prematurely during the revolution, the civil war and the devastation and dislocation that ensued, and millions more starving to death across the length and breadth of the Soviet empire, many of those displaced by events were desperately seeking parents, children or any other relative who had been torn from them hundreds or thousands of miles away. Bands of besprizorny – homeless children with no surviving adult relatives – wandered across the land, begging and stealing. Some apologists still argue that the vastness of the USSR prevented the CPSU leadership from learning the conditions it had brought about. Yet, on 19 March 1922, Lenin called on the Politburo for stronger measures, actually citing the famine with thousands of corpses along the roads and starving people driven to cannibalism.199 Instead of alleviating the suffering he had caused the people he now ruled, Lenin had his eyes set on distant horizons, as though everything was perfect in the Soviet Union.
In his less monomaniacal moments, he may possibly have acknowledged to himself that even the October Revolution might not have taken place but for the catalyst of the First World War, during which the Western belligerents had suffered strikes, demonstrations, mutinies at the front and subsequently some short-lived revolutions, which had failed – in his view – because he was not controlling them. From there, a quantum leap of theoretical politics convinced him that Catherine the Great’s dream of conquering the whole of Europe200 lay within the grasp of the man in the Kremlin – i.e. himself – because there was a far more cost-effective way of inducing that unrest and using it to conquer the capitalist democracies than by going to war against them with bullets, bayonets and bombs. In his view, the personal liberties enjoyed by their citizens – such as free speech, the legal principle of habeas corpus, secret elections, free trade unions and unrestricted travel, none of which were allowed in the Soviet Union – were fatal flaws that could be exploited by politically trained agitators to bring down the democracies from within. If left alone, however, some might find socialist, national-socialist or other non-Communist ways of working out their own salvation. Even followers of Marx might have their own ideas about applying his theories – or they might, like Eisner and Kun, choose the wrong moment or lack the political sense or ruthlessness to mount a successful revolution and consolidate power afterwards.
To ensure that none of these things happened, Lenin decreed that it was imperative to inculcate into revolutionary socialists an unswerving discipline to the Soviet Party line and eliminate those who rebelled. The method was to train them in Russia, and finance their return to their own countries with generous funds to influence public opinion through propaganda, subversion of other political parties, and infiltration of trade unions. By controlling a country’s workforce this way, Lenin was certain that a small number of disciplined activists could paralyse free-market economies as thoroughly as if a virus had been injected into the arteries of capitalism – which, in a sense, it had been.
If simultaneously all the fault lines based on class, sex, colour, religion and ethnic tensions in every democratic society were being ripped open by propaganda and political action, a disciplined pro-Soviet Communist Party would have the ruthlessness, the techniques, and the guidance from Moscow, to grab power in the subsequent civil disorder, and hang on to it by eliminating both rivals and allies. So long as all the foreign activists had it dinned into them that ‘Moscow knows best’, each post-revolutionary society would be based on the Soviet model and become a satellite of the USSR without the need for conquest by force of arms.201
With the Comintern acting as tradecraft school of a fifth column working throughout the non-Communist world by sabotage, subversion and infiltration of trade unions and other political parties, Lenin was effectively declaring a covert war on the same democratic governments with whom he claimed to desire normal diplomatic relations to get Russia back on its feet.
One could fill a library of books documenting completely his strategy for a Communist world centred on Moscow, but the Soviet fostering of Communism in Britain is a fair example. In 1920 a selection was made of the three socialist parties that had done their best to undermine the British government’s war effort. The British Socialist Party, the Socialist Labour Party and Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers’ Socialist Federation were welded into a new party: the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). That required money, so veteran Communist activist Theodore Rothstein, who had been welcomed to Britain in 1891 as a 19-year-old refugee from tsarist Russia, became one of the early bagmen, bringing to Britain money, gold and jewels confiscated from Russians and foreigners who had fled after the revolution or been murdered, like the Romanovs. The proceeds were used to get the CPGB off to a flying start; the initial subsidy exceeded £50,000 – in modern terms, about £1 million202 – this at a time when money was desperately needed to stave off famine in many parts of Russia.
CPGB founder member Bob Stewart wore a bulging money belt around his ample waist on his return from trips to Moscow. His comrade Jack Murphy also shuttled back and forth from Russia to Britain, carrying thousands of pounds in a money belt and accounting for every penny to his Soviet paymasters. On one documented trip, he brought in £12,600 – roughly £250,000 in modern value.203 Another channel was CPGB’s assistant general secretary Reuben Falber, who regularly collected shopping bags bulging with banknotes from a contact in London’s Soviet Embassy. The job was not without risks: Comintern courier Michael Borodin was arrested while indoctrinating Scottish CPGB members and spent six months eating porridge in Glasgow’s Barlinnie prison before deportation back to the land where his sentence for such activities would have been a miserable death.
There was no shortage of couriers and bagmen because in April 1920 the League of Nations appointed Norwegian philanthropist Fridtjof Nansen its high commissioner for the repatriation from Russia of a half-million German and Austro-Hungarian POWs. Lenin refused to recognise the League, but was prepared to deal with Nansen on a personal basis, with few people in the West apparently suspecting that the returnees included many like Béla Kun, who had been indoctrinated in captivity and came home hard-line Communists. Nansen was also appointed by the International Committee of the Red Cross to head an urgent famine relief programme in Russia. Although the Soviet government allowed him to open an office in Moscow, Lenin refused aid of food and other essentials from the American Relief Administration, which assisted war-ravaged European countries, because that revealed Western superiority to the recipients. Not until 1921 was the ARA allowed to open clinics in areas devoid of any medical care, and save uncounted thousands of Russians from starvation and sickness. Had it been allowed to commence operations earlier, it could have saved many more.
In a time when few working-class people had travelled abroad, except under mobilisation during the First World War, one of the perks for the foreign activists was expenses-paid trips to Moscow. CPGB activist Jack Murphy described after his first visit there how the foreign comrades from each country were brainwashed every night by Comintern staff specialising in that target country. No mean talker himself, Murphy commented, ‘The Russians seemed incapable of exhaustion by discussion. We had got to learn that a Communist Party … had to be disciplined, a party organised on military lines.’204 Whenever comrades failed to agree, the mantra hurled at them was ‘Moscow knows best’. As historian Francis Beckett commented in his well-documented history of the CPGB, ‘it was an illusion that was to cost them much misery in the next seven decades.’205
Murphy was himself arrested in Moscow on suspicion of being a spy for the British police. Although he was cleared and released, it was a narrow escape. As he admitted dryly afterwards, ‘The Russians have a method of dealing with police spies that does not leave any room for continued activity.’206
The degree to which Lenin controlled the foreign parties is exampled by feminist Sylvia Pankhurst being barred from the position in the CPGB merited by her previous political record because she argued with him over a number of issues. That hardheaded Scot Willie Gallagher, who had been convicted in 1916 under the Defence of the Realm Act for anti-war activities in the Clydeside dockyards, fell completely under Lenin’s spell. But even he did not gain Lenin’s seal of approval to become boss of the CPGB because he was also too independent to accept Comintern orders unquestioningly. Instead, Moscow selected 31-year-old boilermaker Harry Pollitt, a member of Pankhurst’s Workers’ Socialist Federation who had used cash brought from Moscow by Pankhurst for the ‘Hands Off Russia’ campaign to bribe London dockers not to coal up a ship carrying a cargo of munitions intended for Poland’s war against its Soviet invaders.207
To ride herd on Pollitt, Moscow chose the brilliant, but embittered, 35-year-old academic Rajani Palme Dutt, the many chips on whose shoulders should have prevented him ever standing up straight. Son of a Swedish mother and an Indian father, Dutt hated everything about Britain, the British and their way of life. That it was flawed and exploitative of the working classes, no one would now disagree. That it was nowhere near as flawed and exploitative as the Soviet regime he worshipped was something to which Dutt shut his eyes resolutely. The third member of CPGB’s governing trio was Harry Inkpin, who seems to have been chosen as a rubber stamp for the decisions of Dutt and Pollitt, under whom the party pursued its grimly pro-Moscow course for seventy-one years.208 Inkpin’s brother Albert was made General Secretary and became one of the first ‘martyrs’, imprisoned for six months in 1920 for publishing pro-Soviet propaganda and again in 1921 after police raided the party’s premises in King Street, Covent Garden. Purchased with Soviet money, its sale was to save the discredited CPGB from insolvency half a century later.
To finance the CPGB, whose low membership came nowhere near justifying the expenses of its militantism, the Comintern sent millions in subsidies, which continued until the mid-1930s – and much later for the CPGB main organ, the Daily Worker newspaper,209 thousands of copies of which were purchased in advance and flown to Moscow every day. Lenin in his mausoleum could congratulate himself that his blueprint was working when the CPGB managed to have three candidates elected to Parliament in the 1930s. Yet Dutt and his equally ruthless Estonian mistress Salme Murrik, an illegal immigrant who slipped into Britain in 1920, frequently antagonised their British comrades until Lenin summoned the Central Committee of the CPGB to Moscow for a lesson on the meaning of ‘Moscow knows best’. A few years later, they would have disappeared into the Gulag or an unmarked grave but after their return to Britain pro-Moscow discipline inside the CPGB improved, although often disturbed by Dutt’s paranoid suspicion of all his colleagues.
So powerful was their subsequent belief in Moscow-style Communism that it withstood the evidence of their own eyes and ears that the USSR was a tyranny, ruled first by Lenin and then by Stalin, where their own friends and trusted mentors could be imprisoned, tortured and executed without trial, and where those whom they had been taught to revere as gods in the Communist pantheon could be denounced with fatal results as capitalist spies, paid saboteurs and ‘counter-revolutionary elements’. Perhaps one day some psychologist will explain why such dyed-in-the-wool atheists found in their contacts with the leadership of the CPSU what other believers would call a religious experience.