A People's Tragedy (168 page)

Lenin's funeral took place on the following Sunday in arctic temperatures of minus 35°

centigrade. Stalin led the guards of honour who carried the open coffin from the Hall of Columns to Red Square, where it was placed on a wooden platform. The Bolshoi Theatre orchestra played Chopin's Funeral March, followed by the old revolutionary hymn, 'You Fell Victim', and the Internationale. Then, for six hours, column after column, in all an estimated half a million people, marched past the coffin in gloomy silence, lowering their banners as they passed. At precisely 4 p.m., as the coffin was slowly lowered into the vault, sirens and factory whistles, cannons and guns, were sounded across Russia, as if letting out a huge national wail. On the radio there was a single message: 'Stand up, comrades, Ilich is being lowered into his grave.' Then there was silence and

everything stopped — trains, ships, factories — until the radio broadcast once again:

'Lenin has died — but Leninism lives!'

In his will Lenin had expressed the wish to be buried next to his mother's grave in Petrograd. That was also the wish of his family. But Stalin wanted to embalm the corpse. If he was to keep alive the cult of Lenin, if he was to prove that 'Leninism lives', there had to be a body on display, one which, like the relics of the saints, was immune to corruption. He forced his plan through the Politburo against the objections of Trotsky, Bukharin and Kamenev. The idea of the embalmment was pardy inspired by the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922. Lenin's funeral was compared in
Lzvestiia
to those of 'the founders of the great states in ancient times'. But it probably owed as much to Stalin's Byzantine interpretation of the Russian Orthodox rites.

Trotsky, who was horrified by Stalin's plan, compared it to the religious cults of the Middle Ages: 'Earlier there were the relics of Sergius of Radonezh and Serafim of Sarov; now they want to replace these with the relics of Vladimir Ilich.' At first they tried to preserve Lenin's body by refrigeration. But it soon began to decompose. A special team of scientists (known as the Commission for Immortalization) was appointed on 26 February, five weeks after Lenin's death, with the task of finding an embalming fluid. After working round the clock for several weeks, the scientists finally came up with a formula said to contain glycerine, alcohol and other chemicals (its precise composition is still kept a secret). Lenin's pickled body was placed in a wooden crypt — later replaced by the granite mausoleum which exists today — by the Kremlin wall on Red Square. It was opened to the public in August 1924.50

Lenin's brain was removed from his body and transferred to the Lenin Institute. There it was studied by a team of scientists, charged with the task of discovering the 'substance of his genius'. They were to show that Lenin's brain represented a 'higher stage of human evolution'. It was sliced up into 30,000 segments, each stored between glass plates in carefully monitored conditions, so that future generations of scientists would be able to study it and discover its essential secrets. The brains of other 'undisputed geniuses' — Kirov, Kalinin, Gorky, Mayakovsky, Eisenstein and Stalin himself — were later added to this cerebral collection. They formed the beginnings of the Institute of the Brain, which still exists in Moscow today. In 1994 it publicized its final autopsy on Lenin: his was a perfectly average brain.51 Which just goes to show that ordinary brains can sometimes inspire extraordinary behaviour.

* * * What would have happened if Lenin had lived? Was Russia already set on the path of Stalinism? Or did the NEP and Lenin's last writings offer it a different departure?

Historians should not really concern themselves with hypothetical questions. It is hard enough to establish what actually happened, let alone to

prophesy what might (or in this case might not) have happened. But the consequences of Lenin's succession are perhaps large enough to warrant a few words of speculation.

After all, so much of the history of the revolution has been written from the perspective of what happened inside Stalin's Russia that one may well ask whether there was any real alternative.

On the one hand it seems clear that the basic elements of the Stalinist regime — the one-party state, the system of terror and the cult of the personality — were all in place by 1924. The party apparatus was, for the most part, an obedient tool in Stalin's hands.

The majority of its provincial bosses had been appointed by Stalin himself, as the head of the Orgburo, in the civil war. They shared his plebeian hatred for the specialists and the intelligentsia, were moved by his rhetoric of proletarian solidarity and Russian nationalism, and on most questions of ideology were willing to defer to their Great Leader. After all, they were the former subjects of the tsars. Lenin's last struggle for the

'democratic' reform of the party was never likely to succeed in its attempt to change this basic culture. His proposed reforms were purely bureaucratic, concerned only with the reform of the internal structure of the dictatorship, and as such were incapable of addressing the real problem of the NEP: the strained political relationship between the regime and society, the unconquered countryside in particular. Without a genuine democratization, without a basic change in the ruling attitudes of the Bolsheviks, the NEP was always doomed to fail. Economic freedom and dictatorship are incompatible in the long term.

On the other hand, there were fundamental differences between Lenin's regime and that of Stalin. Fewer people were murdered for a start. And, despite the ban on factions, the party still made room for comradely debate. Trotsky and Bukharin argued passionately with each other about the strategy of the NEP — the former favoured squeezing the foodstuffs from the peasantry whenever the breakdown of the market system threatened to slow down industrialization, whereas Bukharin was prepared to allow a slower pace of industrialization so as to maintain a market-based relationship with the peasantry —

but these were still intellectual debates, both men were supporters of the NEP, and, despite their differences, neither would have dreamt of using these debates as a pretext to murder one another or to send their opponents to Siberia. Only Stalin was capable of this. He alone saw that Trotsky and Bukharin had become so blinded by their own political debates and rivalry that he could use the one to destroy the other.

In this sense Stalin's personal role was itself the crucial factor — as was, by his absence, Lenin's role as well. If Lenin's final stroke had not prevented him from speaking at the Congress in 1923, Stalin's name today would occupy a place only in the footnotes of Russian history books. But that
'if
was, if you will, in the hands of providence, and this is history not theology.

Conclusion

'I do not believe that in the twentieth century there is such a thing as a "betrayed people",' Gorky wrote to Romain Rolland in 1922. 'The idea of a "betrayed people" is nothing but a legend. Even in Africa there are only peoples not yet organized and therefore powerless politically.'1 Gorky's view of the Russian Revolution denied that the people had been betrayed by it. Their revolutionary tragedy lay in the legacies of their own cultural backwardness rather than the evil of some 'alien' Bolsheviks. They were not the victims of the revolution but protagonists in its tragedy. This may be a painful lesson for the Russian people to learn at the end of the twentieth century. Seventy years of Communist oppression might well be thought to have earned them the right to see themselves as victims. But Russia's prospects as a democratic nation depend to a large extent on how far the Russians are able to confront their own recent history; and this must entail the recognition that, however much the people were oppressed by it, the Soviet system grew up in Russian soil. It was the weakness of Russia's democratic culture which enabled Bolshevism to take root. This was the legacy of Russian history, of centuries of serfdom and autocratic rule, that had kept the common people powerless and passive. 'And the people remained silent' was a Russian proverb — and it describes much of Russian history. To be sure, this was a people's tragedy but it was a tragedy which they helped to make. The Russian people were trapped by the tyranny of their own history.

'We are slaves because we are unable to free ourselves,' Herzen once wrote. If there was one lesson to be drawn from the Russian Revolution it was that the people had failed to emancipate themselves. They had failed to become their own political masters, to free themselves from emperors and become citizens. Kerensky's speech of 1917, in which he claimed that the Russian people were perhaps no more than 'rebellious slaves', was to haunt the revolution in succeeding years. For while the people could destroy the old system, they could not rebuild a new one of their own. None of the democratic organizations established before October 1917 survived more than a few years of Bolshevik rule, at least not in their democratic form. By 1921, if not earlier, the revolution had come full circle, and a new autocracy had been imposed on Russia which in many ways resembled the old one.

To explain this failure of democracy one must go back into Russian history. Centuries of serfdom and autocratic rule had prevented the ordinary people from acquiring the consciousness of citizens. One can draw a direct line from this serf culture to the despotism of the Bolsheviks. The abstract concept of the 'political nation', of a constitutional structure of civic rights, which had underpinned the French Revolution, remained largely alien to the Russian peasantry, confined in their isolated village worlds. The popular notion of power in Russia continued to be articulated in terms of coercive domination and quasi-religious authority derived from the traditions of serfdom and autocracy rather than in terms of a modern law-based state distributing rights and duties between citizens. The everyday power that the peasant knew — the power of the gentry captain and the police — was arbitrary and violent. To defend himself from this despotism he relied not on appeals to legal rights — indeed he replicated this despotic violence in his brutal treatment of his wife and children — but on the evasion of officialdom. Power
for
the peasant meant autonomy — it meant freedom from the state — which in itself was almost bound to give rise to a new coetcive state, not least because the effect of this anarchic striving was to make the village virtually ungovernable. Indeed there were times in 1917 when the peasants themselves called for a 'master's hand', a 'popular autocracy' of the Soviets, to bring order to the revolutionary village.2 The anarchism of the peasant was often wrapped in a cocoon of authoritarianism. Russian culture was one in which power was conceived not in terms of law but in terms of coercion and hegemony. It was a question of masters and men, of which side would prevail and dominate the other. Lenin once described it as

'who whom?' In this sense the revolution was the 'serfs' revenge', as Prince Lvov put it in the violent summer of 1917, and it led to the mass terror of the civil war.

The outcome could have been different. During the last decades of the old regime a public sphere was emerging which, given enough time and freedom to develop, might have transformed Russia into a modern constitutional society. The institutions of this civil society — public bodies, newspapers, political parties — were all growing at enormous speed. Western concepts of citizenship, of law and private property, were starting to take root. Not even the peasants were left untouched, as the story of Semenov's reform efforts in the village of Andreevskoe shows. To be sure, the new political culture was fragile and confined largely to the tiny urban liberal classes; and, as the events of 1905 showed, it was always likely to be swept away by the bloody violence of the 'serfs' revenge'. But there were enough signs of modern social evolution to suggest that Russia's power question might have been resolved in a peaceful way.

Everything depended on the tsarist regime's willingness to introduce reforms. But there was the rub. Russia's last two Tsars were deeply hostile to the idea of a modern constitutional order. As Russia moved towards the twentieth century, they sought to return it

to the seventeenth, ruling Russia from the court and trying to roll back the modernizing influence of the bureaucracy. The archaic privileges of the noble estate were increasingly defended by the court and its supporters against the logic of a modern social order based on the ownership of property, which Stolypin had tried to introduce.

As a result a violent peasant revolution became almost inevitable. The civil liberties and parliamentary rights extracted from the Tsar in October 1905 were successively withdrawn by the autocracy once the revolutionary danger passed, with the result that a constitutional resolution of the power question became virtually impossible. Time and time again, the obstinate refusal of the tsarist regime to concede reforms turned what should have been a political problem into a revolutionary crisis: decent-minded liberals like Prince Lvov were forced into the revolutionary camp by the regimes idiotic policy of blocking the initiatives of patriotic public bodies such as the zemstvos; self-improving workers like Kanatchikov, deprived of the right to defend their class interests through legal parties and trade unions, were forced into the revolutionary underground; and those non-Russians who had wanted more rights for their national culture were driven by the tsarist policies of Russification to demand their nation's independence from Russia. The tsarist regime's downfall was not inevitable; but its own stupidity made it so.

The First World War was a gigantic test of the modern state, and as the only major European state which had failed to modernize before the war it was a test which tsarist Russia was almost bound to fail. The military establishment was too dominated by the court's own loyal aristocrats for more competent generals like Brusilov to assume command of the country's war effort; the military-industrial complex, to adopt a Cold War phrase, was too closely (and corruptly) linked with the bureaucracy to create a competitive war economy; while the tsarist regime was far too jealous of its powers to allow the sort of public war initiatives from which other powers derived so much strength. But the regime's overwhelming shortcoming was its utter failure to muster the patriotism of its peasant soldiers, who for the most part felt little obligation to fight for the Russia beyond their own native region, and even less to fight for the Tsar. This was the ultimate proof of the regime's failure to build a modern state: the ordinary peasant did not feel that he was subject to its laws. The tsarist regime paid the price for this with its own downfall — as, in their own way, did the democratic leaders of 1917. They also tied their fortunes to the war campaign in the naive belief that the 'patriotic masses'