The Naked Communist (19 page)

As might have been expected, this decomposition of the Russian economy brought down upon the heads of the people all the wrath and frustration of the Bolshevik leaders. Every terror method known was used to force the people to produce. This led to retaliation.

Bolshevik atrocities. Fifty bodies of community leaders
of Wesenburg are exhumed from a lake after being shot and mutilated
in reprisal for the death of two Communists.

White Russians retaliate by hanging suspected Bolsheviks.
During the Civil War several million lost their lives.

Bolsheviks use a confiscated church for a wheat granary.
This was part of the Red campaign to discourage religious worship.

During the summer of 1918, violent civil war broke out as the "White Guard" vowed they would overthrow the Reds and free the Russian people. The western Allied Nations, though hard-pressed themselves, were sympathetic to this movement and sent supplies, equipment and even what troops they could spare to help release the Russian people from the Bolshevik grip.

Trotsky addresses a contingent of the Red Army which
he ultimately built up to a force of five million men.

Lenin knew this was a crisis of the highest order. He therefore decided to strike back in three different directions simultaneously. To resist organized military groups, he authorized Trotsky to forcibly mobilize a Red Army which ultimately totaled five million. To resist the people's anti-Bolshevik sentiment and refusal to work, he organized the secret police or Cheka. This body could investigate arrest, adjudicate and execute suspected persons. Authorities state that during the civil war, literally tens of thousands went down before its firing squads. Finally, Lenin struck out at the Tsar. To prevent any possibility of a new monarchial party being developed, he had the Tsar, the Empress, their children and all their retainers shot to death at Yekaterinburg and their bodies completely destroyed. This mass assassination occurred July 16, 1918.

Six weeks later the scalding vengeance of the White Russians nearly cost Lenin his life. The Bolshevik aristocracy was caught under vulnerable circumstances and a volley of rifle fire assassinated the Cheka chief and seriously wounded Lenin. To avenge itself, the Cheka summarily executed 500 persons.

When the end of World War I came on November 11, 1918, it had little effect on the situation in Russia. The civil war continued with even greater violence, and the Bolsheviks redoubled their efforts to communize Russia. Lenin continued to set up Soviets or workers' councils, in every part of the empire, and these Soviets in turn sent delegates to the supreme Soviet at the capital. Through the channels of this Bolshevik-dominated labor-union empire, Lenin carried out his policies. Behind the Soviets stood the enforcing power of the Red Army, and the terror of the Cheka secret police.

In spite of all these coercive methods, however, Lenin eventually discovered he was fighting a losing battle. For a while he took courage from the fact that United States, England, France and Japan began withdrawing their troops and supplies under the League of Nations policy of "self-determination for all peoples," but the ferocious fighting of the White Russians continued.

The breaking point for Lenin came in 1921-22 when the economic inefficiency of the Bolshevik regime was compounded by a disastrous famine. There was a complete crop failure along the Volga -- the bread basket of Russia. Nikolaus Basaeches wrote: "No one who was ever in that famine area, no one who saw those starving and brutalized people, will ever forget the spectacle. Cannibalism was common. The despairing people crept about, emaciated, like brown mummies.... When those hordes fell upon an unprepared village, they were apt to massacre every living person."

Packs of wild, orphaned children roamed like hungry wolves through cities and country sides. It is estimated that during the year 1922, over 33 million Russians were starving, and 5 million died. The people of the United States were so shocked by this almost inconceivable amount of human suffering that they raised funds for the Hoover Commission to feed over 10 million Russians during 1922.

The End of a Communist Dream

Even before this disaster, however, Lenin had forced himself to admit that he had assigned his country an impossible task. His Bolshevik revolution had not brought peace to Russia, but a terrible civil war in which 28 million Russians had lost their lives. The principles of socialism which Lenin had forced upon the people had not brought increased production as Marx had promised, but had reduced production to a point where even in normal times it would not adequately clothe nor feed half the people.

It was under these circumstances and in the light of these facts that Lenin acknowledged defeat and ordered a retreat. As early as 1921 he announced that there would be a "New Economic Program" -- afterwards referred to as the NEP.

This humiliating reversal of policy was adopted by the Communists to keep from being dethroned. Lenin brought back the payment of wages to workers, which immediately generated the circulation of money in place of the old barter system. In place of the government trading centers, he allowed private concerns to begin buying and selling so that in less than a year three-fourths of all retail distribution was back in private hands. He violated the sanctity of Marx's memory by even encouraging the peasants to lease additional land and hire other peasants to work for them. He also tried to encourage private initiative by promising the peasants they could sell most of their grain on the open market instead of having it seized by agents of the government as in the past.

In merely a matter of months, the pauperism and starvation of the old Communist economy began to disappear. The law of supply and demand began to have its effect so that private initiative commenced to provide what the people needed. In the cities an air of relative prosperity rapidly returned to the bleak streets and empty shops.

The Rise of Stalin to Power

Lenin barely lived long enough to see the New Economic Program go into effect. He had his first stroke in 1922, and died January 20, 1924. As Lenin saw the end drawing near, he became alarmed over the possibility of Joseph Stalin becoming his successor. For many years Lenin had been using Stalin to perform tasks requiring the most ruthless methods, but now he became fearful of what might happen if Stalin used these same methods to take over the Communist Party.

On December 25, 1923, while lying speechless and half-paralyzed on his deathbed, Lenin wrote the following dramatic appeal to the members of the Politiburo (the supreme governing council of the Communist Party, and hence, of all Russia):

"Stalin is too rude, and this fault, entirely supportable in relations among us Communists, becomes insupportable in the office of the General Secretary. Therefore, I propose to the comrades to find a way to remove Stalin from that position and appoint to it another man who in all respects differs from Stalin ... namely, more patients, more loyal, more polite, and more attentive to comrades, less capricious, etc. This circumstance may seem an insignificant trifle, but I think that from the point of view of preventing a split, and from the point of view of the relation between Stalin and Trotsky ... it is not a trifle, or it is such a trifle as may acquire decisive significance."

Time proved that Lenin knew whereof he spoke. Stalin's whole attitude toward life may be caught in a statement which he later made as he was rising to power: "To choose one's victim, to prepare one's plans minutely, to stake an implacable vengeance, and then go to bed ... there is nothing sweeter in the world."

Trotsky was purged from the Russian government by Stalin
and fled to Mexico to escape assassination. Although Trotsky lived
under constant guard, a killer finally got through to him in
August, 1940, and smashed his skull with an alpenstock.

By 1927 Stalin had achieved precisely what Lenin feared he might -- the outright control of the Russian Empire. He had not only unseated Trotsky, but had driven from the arena every formidable source of opposition. He had attained such complete victory in the battle for the control of world Communism that he now felt strong enough to try and satisfy one of his greatest ambitions. He determined to make a second attempt to communize Russia.

The First Five-Year Plan

The first Five-Year Plan began in 1928. It was aimed at wiping out the prosperous independence of businessmen and the peasant farmers who had been thriving during the New Economic Program. Once again there was widespread confiscation of property, and once again the secret police began executing masses of Russians who resisted. Stalin was determined that the Russian economy should be immediately forced into the confines of theoretical socialism and demonstrate to the world that it could out-produce and out-distribute the capitalistic industrial nations, such as the United States and Great Britain. Within weeks, however, the Five-Year-Plan had wiped out the warm glow of prosperity and comparative abundance which Russia had known under the NEP. Rationing was necessary and the hated revolutionary "starvation bread" made of birch bark had to be reintroduced.