Keys of This Blood (37 page)

The third Leninist principle was the basic counterintelligence dimension of Party rule. That principle would hold in the Soviet Party-State and would be extended country by country as an essential element of the proletarian Paradise.

Long after Lenin's corpse was encased in glass and granite beneath Red Square, and long after his ideal of the world as the Workers' Paradise had been betrayed, those principles would stand as the pillars upon which the Soviet geopolitical institution he made possible would be based. His firm conviction about the international—and ultimately the geopolitical—role of the USSR remained as the ineradicable hallmark of the authentic Leninist-Marxist mind.

Lenin's errors of judgment are patently clear to a later generation, and to list them does magnify one's horror at his mental provincialism; at the same time it underlines the mountain to which Mikhail Gorbachev has set his shoulder.

Relying on analyses produced by Marx in the last third of the nineteenth century—analyses already flawed in themselves and, in any case, based on data no longer valid in the twentieth century, Lenin went on to commit his gravest mistake in judgment. Led by slanted or incomplete data of his own, his perspective distorted by what amounted to wishful thinking, Lenin presumed that everywhere there was a vast downtrodden proletariat “structure.” And he assumed that everywhere an utterly oppressive “superstructure” lay atop the proletariat like an incubus.

Topple that superstructure, he imagined, and—Presto!—the proletariat would rise as one world body and destroy its oppressors.

If the workers of the world did not arise in wrath, it was only because capitalism—in its agonizing death throes—had temporarily prolonged its life by expanding into colonial areas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But he saw it collapsing with the start of World War I. With that collapse, Lenin was certain that the last alternative for the decadent capitalist systems would be spent. Soon, therefore, very soon, there would be an overwhelming wave of revolutions. They were just waiting to be sparked among the working classes everywhere—in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas. One supposes that such a simplistic trust in a coming wave of revolutions was at least bolstered in Lenin's mind by the visible breakup of empires, and by the economic plight of post-World War I Europe.

Having renounced all reliance on the moral and religious traditions that had made Western civilization possible in the first place, however, Lenin suffered from a poverty of alternatives. His organizational genius was undeniable. But his intellectualism was a borrowed and piecemeal thing; and it had gone barren. Like Marx before him, he was guilty of a false and subjective reading of history that left him with an appallingly skewed vision of what the future must be like. And not the least of it was his misreading from start to finish of how free-market economics would actually fare, and of how resilient was democracy as preserved in capitalist nations.

There was one quickly passing moment toward the end of his life when Lenin had within arm's reach the possibility of correcting the most fatal flaws in his Leninism. It came in the person of a relatively obscure and resourceless Sardinian by the name of Antonio Gramsci.

A convinced Marxist living in Italy at the very moment Benito Mussolini came to power, Gramsci took off for Lenin's USSR in 1922 and remained there for the last two years of Lenin's life. He absorbed all of Lenin's geopolitical vision, and all of Lenin's conviction that a force innate in mankind was driving it on toward the “Workers' Paradise.”

For all that, however, Gramsci was too aware of the facts of history and of life to accept the gratuitous assumption—made in the first instance by Marx, and then accepted unquestioningly by Lenin—that human society was divided throughout the world into the two broad and simple camps defined as the oppressed “structure” of the people and the oppressive “superstructure” of capitalism.

As a well-informed historian and a well-trained objective analyst, Gramsci argued against such deceptive imaginings. He argued and wrote about a common culture that had forged a complex homogeneity among all the classes in the Western capitalist nations. He recognized it as a culture that had been seeded and brought to fruition by nearly two thousand years of religion and politics, literature and art, war and peace. There was no chasm, said Gramsci, between the proletarian masses and what Marx and Lenin called the superstructure. There was only social advantage and economic predominance.

As a realist, Gramsci knew he was knocking his Marxist head against the bulwark of Christian culture, which pointed unceasingly to something beyond man and outside man's material cosmos. Gramsci's triumph—a posthumous one, as it turned out—was that he understood how that Christian bulwark could be and would be undone; and it had nothing to do with violent revolution and the universal uprising of the proletariat. Indeed, it was a solution that would prove to be far more subtle and far more effective than anything imagined by Marx or Lenin.

Gramsci's discussions and arguments on this crucial point of Leninist violence did not earn him any great popularity among his socialist brothers in the Moscow of that time, however. By the time he left the Soviet Union, Gramsci knew the world would face two specters in the immediate future. The Fascism of Mussolini—“
il gran pappone di tutto fascismo
” (the granddaddy of all Fascists), as he later described the Italian dictator—was the first specter. The rise of Stalin in the Soviet Union was the second.

Gramsci chose to make his stand in Italy. His day in the Leninist sun would be postponed. But it would come.

While it is testimony to Lenin's driving persuasiveness, and to Feliks Dzerzhinsky's prowess at seductive deception, it is hardly to their own credit that over time—and unlike the clear-eyed Gramsci—a certain number of highly regarded intellectuals in England, France, Germany and the United States bought into Lenin's reading of history, flaws and all.

The Depression at the end of the twenties and in the thirties was the convincer for those minds. Stunted by the same poverty of historic alternatives that afflicted Lenin, and willing to believe Dzerzhinsky's sophisticated scenarios—“disinformation” was the word the Soviets finally coined—those intellectuals could conceive of no choice left for the West except Sovietization. The permanent Marxism of an Edmund Wilson, and the slavish adulation of Stalin by so many English and Americans, are explicable if not excusable in the light of an intellectualism that was less realistic than romantic, and that was easily cuckolded.

Lincoln Steffens raised the most apt and famous banner for this group. With one visit to the USSR behind him, Steffens was like a teenager in love. “I have seen the future” in the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin, he declared with an unreserved and now manifest fatheadedness, “and it works.”

It had to be admitted that the free press of the West did nothing to disabuse such fatheaded assessments. There were no Gramscis among the journalists sent by the major Western news organizations as resident correspondents to Moscow over the years. There were no news flashes alerting the world to the mass liquidation of millions of political enemies of the Leninist-Marxist proletarian revolution on its bloody path to the Marxian ideal of the Workers' Paradise. There were no protest votes at the assemblies of the old League of Nations, no diplomatic protests by Western powers, no sanctions applied by the international community. On the contrary, a steady stream of well-placed magazine and newspaper
articles kept on extolling the glories of “what was going on over in Russia,” as Bernard Shaw described it, “and how finally commonsense and reason are prevailing over the worn-out shibboleths of past ages.” Lenin and Dzerzhinsky must have smiled in satisfaction, and Stalin must have been highly satisfied. The deception was working admirably.

Symptoms of cerebral sclerosis were already manifest in Lenin by March of 1921. His physical deterioration was hastened, no doubt, by the two bullets that remained lodged in his neck and his left shoulder following an attempt on his life in 1918. Ignoring his physical decline, however—and at his most benign shunting aside all criticism, including the clever and prophetic ideas of Antonio Gramsci—Lenin worked on as hard as he could at perfecting his created instrument for violent world revolution.

On February 6, 1922, CHEKA was replaced by a new organization, the State Political Directorate (GPU). Lenin wanted to get rid of “deadwood” in the organization and to implement the lessons learned about counterintelligence not merely as a security service but as a systemic principle for the domestic and foreign functioning of the USSR PartyState.

Despite the fact that Lenin's weakened physical condition was regarded by his physicians as temporary, the need was apparent, by the time the Eleventh Party Congress assembled in Moscow in April of 1922, to appoint someone to carry on until Lenin could regain his strength and resume full control.

The temporary post of General Secretary was created. And, though it was intended as a momentary expedient, the post carried with it control over the Secretariat—the first and most powerful section of the Central
Committee of the CPSU. Control, therefore, over the entire machinery of the proletarian revolution.

The Party's choice to fill this post, aided by Lenin's vote, fell on a man who had been Lenin's close follower since shortly after the turn of the century: the forty-three-year-old Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili.

Born in Gori, Georgia, on December 21, 1879, to a sadistic shoemaker, Vissarion, and a rigidly orthodox and pious mother, Keke, Iosif was destined by Keke to be a Russian Orthodox priest. He did enter the seminary, stayed for five years, and then was dismissed for “disloyal views.”

There followed a more or less murky period in which it is extremely difficult to detach later created legends from original events. Dzhugashvili was into revolution, that much is sure. He was supposedly a socialist with Marxist views. But rather compelling evidence indicates that he did function as a onetime agent for the dreaded Czarist secret security police, the Okhrana, who were hunting to the death all such revolutionaries as Lenin and his Bolsheviks.

Nothing we know about Dzhugashvili's character forbids us to draw this conclusion: He was always a man to hedge his bets until the winning horse broke from the pack. The ambiguity of his character, however, also allows us to speculate that if he did—as seems likely from the evidence—betray some of his “socialist brothers” into Okhrana dungeons and death, he did it in order to get rid of colleagues he considered to be otherwise immovable obstacles on his own path to success.

Presumably, it became clear to Dzhugashvili soon enough that the Czar and his regime were not the horses to back. For once he met Lenin at a Party conference in Tammerfors, Finland, in 1905, Dzhugashvili became his close adherent and a dedicated Marxist.

With Lenin, he attended Party Congresses in Stockholm and London. He became a specialist in raiding Czarist treasury transports to secure working funds for the Bolshevik Party. Like any good revolutionary, he underwent imprisonment and deportation. Like any clever revolutionary, he always managed to escape. Like any canny revolutionary, he never engaged in hand-to-hand combat. And over the years he steadily built up a record as a fantastically skilled organizer with a cool, calculating head, a mind tenaciously attuned to the long term, and nerves of steel.

Dzhugashvili was married three times and fathered two sons and a daughter. The day he buried his first wife, Ekaterina Svanidze, he stood beside a boyhood friend at the edge of the cemetery, and through the already blackened stumps of his teeth spat out the oath that was perhaps
the most revealing commentary on his whole life to come. Defeated in his personal choice and deeply angry, he swore, “I will never again love anybody in this life.”

It may be that he never did. His second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, unable to withstand his hardness and hate, committed suicide. His third wife was Rosa Kaganovich, sister of Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich, a fellow revolutionary and one of Dzhugashvili's trusted lieutenants; they were divorced, and Rosa disappeared into total obscurity.

Even his mother seemed never to have received the slightest token of positive feeling from Dzhugashvili. Despite her son's rise to dictatorial glory, she lived all her life in poverty and obscurity. Content with her icons and medals and devotional activities, Keke died in the reassurance of her Russian Orthodox faith in Christ.

Like many of his revolutionary comrades, Dzhugashvili collected a bevy of aliases over the years—“Ivanovich,” “Koba,” “Comrade K,” “Vassily.” His earliest
klechka
, or nickname, among his comrades spoke of a chilling side to his character. “Demonschile,” they called him. “Devil.”

When he was thirty-four, after some eight years of outstanding Bolshevik activity, Dzhugashvili was co-opted by Lenin into the Central Committee of the CP. It was then that he changed his name once and for all to Joseph Stalin. “Man of Steel.”

Having served by that time as the first editor of
Pravda
—then as now, the newspaper mouthpiece of the Party regime—and in several other important posts in the Party and its state apparatus, Stalin was increasingly privy to all the inner councils of Lenin's Bolsheviks.

By the spring of 1922, Stalin did appear to be the most capable man to put in temporary charge of the Party machinery as General Secretary. In any case, it would only be for a short while. Lenin would be back in shape and in charge again in no time, after all. But the first stroke hit Lenin on May 26, 1922. It left him with his right arm and leg partially paralyzed, and with some speech disturbance. Determined not to give in, he was back in his office by October. But on December 15, a second stroke meant that Lenin's work was effectively over.