Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (39 page)

Incidentally, Lenin was personally beyond challenge as leader of the Party. Everyone saw him as the senior figure. While they might mumble behind his back or argue for different courses of action in meetings, it was unthinkable that anyone would criticize Lenin personally in the terms he used to reprimand others. He did not fully accept the truth of this himself, however, and when a leftist critic, A.A. Ioffe, claimed that Lenin was the Central Committee Lenin denied it exclaiming it was an ‘
absolutely, impossible, absolutely impossible
thing’ which could only have been proposed by someone ‘in a state of nervous irritation and overwork’. He claimed, somewhat unconvincingly since no one has been able to identify the reference, that he had been defeated in the Central Committee ‘on one of the vastly important questions’. [CW 45 99–100] Lenin was a prophet among disciples: reprimands only went in one direction.

Altogether, by 1920 Lenin had made himself into a kind of philosopher king. He was not simply administering a country, still less milking it in his own interest. There can hardly be any modern ruler who personally benefited less than Lenin from his period in office. Rather, he was conducting a nationwide seminar and practical based on hypotheses which Lenin took as undeniable axioms. Indeed, the legitimacy he claimed for himself and his government did not arise from a clear popular mandate – no serious elections were ever held in these years – but from his philosophical claim to possess the correct policies and consciousness of the ruled, even if the ruled themselves did not see things that way. He was, in this respect a secular equivalent of theocratic leaders who derive their legitimacy from the truth of their doctrines, not popular mandates.

Such were the qualities and personal assets and liabilities which Lenin brought to the situation of 1920. The ending of the struggle against the Whites did not bring unalloyed joy but a new set of problems on which Lenin was, in reality, defeated by the indirect forces of the working class and, even more so, of the peasants.

THE EMERGENCE OF NEP; TRANSITION MODEL NUMBER THREE

In January 1921 Lenin came up with a phrase that encapsulates a great deal of what he stood for: ‘Politics must take precedence over economics. To argue otherwise is to forget the ABC of Marxism’. He also claimed ‘that politics is a concentrated expression of economics’. [
Once again on the Trade Unions, the Current Situation and the Mistakes of Trotsky and Bukharin
, 25 January, SW 3 527.] In these words lie the strength and weakness of Leninism in practice. By 1921 Lenin had, in a sense, got the politics right in that his party was unchallenged in its governing position. All other political parties had been reduced to nothing. However, political victory had been bought at a terrible social and economic price. The cost of concentrating on politics had been neglect of the economy. Even worse, the economy had been subjected to illthought-out experiments arising from minds in which the political had been overwhelmingly dominant. As we saw even in
The April Theses
, economic proposals were almost entirely lacking and those that were present were reduced to political and institutional measures. In the eyes of Marxist critics of Bolshevism, notably most Mensheviks, to put such stress on politics was to put the cart before the horse. Marxism was about economic conditions giving rise to political outcomes, not the other way round.

In practice, there was much in the situation of 1920/1 to enable both sides to claim to have been right. In a self-justificatory piece entitled
Our Revolution: A Propos of N.N. Sukhanov’s Notes
written later, Lenin defended his approach against Menshevik criticism. Who could say that it was impossible to take power first and then build the necessary level of civilization later and ‘proceed to overtake the other nations’? [SW 3 767] In productionism Lenin had developed a tool he hoped would do exactly this. For Mensheviks, however, the complete collapse of Russia’s society and economy confirmed the mistake of the Bolsheviks in taking power prematurely. In their view, the cost of seizing and holding power was to destroy the vital life forces of the popular revolution and substitute a hungry and desperate mass of people.

Lenin’s stance is all the more complicated in that, on 22 December 1920, in the same speech to the Eighth Congress of Soviets in which he coined the ultimate productionist slogan – ‘Communism is Soviet Power plus the Electrification of the Whole Country’ – he also commented that ‘We have, no doubt, learned politics; here we stand firm as a rock. But things are bad as far as economic matters are concerned.’ [SW 3 510] In fact, even the political situation was not as rosy as Lenin implied. The decline of the Whites had opened up the prospect of the masses airing their grievances against the Bolsheviks, and this is exactly what many of them were doing. Major peasant uprisings in West Siberia and Tambov were echoed by many smaller acts of opposition. Workers were protesting against worsening conditions and the approaching threat of labour conscription. As Lenin spoke, in December, one of the heartlands of popular revolution, the Kronstadt naval base, was seething with discontent arising mainly from the continuation of armed grain requisition and suppression of its liberties. In March 1921 open revolt broke out.

The main driving force behind the opposition was economic. The industrial economy had collapsed. Lenin’s grandiose schemes for covering Russia ‘with a dense network of electric power stations and powerful technical installations’ so that ‘our communist economic development will become a model for a future socialist Europe and Asia’ [SW 3 514] seemed very distant. The constant references in the speech to state compulsion of labour were menacing. The end of the war; the collapse of the industrial economy; the unpopularity of continued forcible extraction of grain from the peasants; the uprisings – all demanded a major overall rethink of strategy. Transition model number two, war communism, was dead in the water. Lenin had to think up yet another transition model. In early 1921 it emerged in the form of the New Economic Policy (NEP).

NEP was born out of failure and defeat. Since 1919 Lenin had been attempting to win over the middle peasants. The uprisings showed he had failed. He had failed because the peasants were not prepared, once the war was ended, to put up with forced grain requisitioning. Although their active revolts were savagely suppressed they none the less defeated the Party economically. By responding to requisitioning by growing less they posed a major threat to the remnants of industry, the cities and the army. ‘Political’ methods had failed. In its place Lenin turned, for once, to an economic solution. Replace requisitioning by a tax in kind which was officially endorsed at the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921. The new system meant that the more the peasants grew, the more they could keep, so they had an incentive. The more the peasants grew the more they would hand over to the state in tax, so the community also gained. Lenin believed the measures would create a positive dynamic. The peasants would grow more, the state could take more and use it to industrialize. The increasingly wealthy peasants would provide a market for the new industries so the industrial sector would also be stimulated. Under NEP, Lenin believed, the prosperity of the peasant would grow hand-in-hand with the development of industry. Not only that. Seeing the potential benefits industry could bring to the rural economy, especially machinery, peasants would realize they could enrich themselves better through amalgamating their holdings than in sticking with household-based smallholdings. They would, thereby, be won over to superior socialist forms of agriculture.

It is not our present task to trace the long-term problems of this system and join in the fascinating debate about its potential since the longer-term implications were not clear to Lenin before he died. The main problem was maintaining a satisfactory (to the Party) balance between agriculture, which the authorities wanted to downplay, and industry, which they wanted to expand as quickly as possible to ‘catch up other nations’. Arguably, by the time of Lenin’s death, the problems of NEP were already emerging. It was much easier to restore farms over two or three years than industry which was much more complex and interrelated so that progress could only advance at the speed permitted by the slowest bottleneck. Agricultural recovery provided a better supply of food products. Better supply caused prices to fall. Continuing industrial scarcity kept prices for manufactured goods high. The danger was that the combination of low prices for the produce they sold and high prices for the goods they wanted to buy would discourage the peasants from maximizing output.

The attempt to directly control industry was also abandoned as impractical. Output was at something like 20 per cent of pre-war norms in 1920 so failure was visible here too. In the event, factories were de-linked from the centre. A new system of ‘economic accounting’ (
khozraschet
) was introduced which gave larger enterprises their independence and required them to sink or swim by their own resources. It was not universally popular because, under this system, even though the larger elements remained state-owned, they could still face bankruptcy. They also tried to improve productivity and this ended the featherbedding of workers, many of whom were made redundant. Unemployment was a rising problem by the mid-1920s. Some space for small private workshops and cooperative restaurants, shops and other small services was also opened up. The state retained control of the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy – large factories, transport, taxation, foreign trade and so on – but a greater degree of independence characterized the new conditions.

However, in the short term, NEP allowed the economy and society gradually to recover. By about 1927/8 pre-war levels of agrarian and industrial output had been achieved. By laying off excessive ‘political’ direction from above, the economy had considerably improved. Interestingly, it was not foreordained that the change would be towards the state taking one step back. True to form, Lenin, and even more so Trotsky, retained the instinct of maximum direction and control from above. It has been argued that, between ‘war communism’ and NEP, there was an attempt to impose a more dirigiste model based on labour conscription.
⁵
Certainly, the demobilization of the army presented a tempting opportunity. If five million peasants could join up to fight for the Soviet state, why could they not be retained to work for it in priority sectors? And if that could be done why not extend it to workers in general?

The breathtaking leap from worker liberation to complete worker servitude was being contemplated. Even in December 1920, only a few weeks before the adoption of NEP, in his already mentioned address to the Eighth Congress of Soviets, Lenin was still playing with the idea of greater central control as the solution to the crisis. ‘The dictatorship of the proletariat has been successful because it has been able to combine compulsion with persuasion. The dictatorship of the proletariat does not fear any resort to compulsion and to the most severe, decisive and ruthless forms of coercion by the state.’ [SW 3 495] In their unprecedented response to the military struggle, Lenin argued, the non-Party peasants ‘did really come to the conclusion that the exploiters are ruthless enemies and that a ruthless state power is required to crush them. We succeeded in rousing unprecedented numbers of people to display an intelligent attitude towards the war, and to support it actively.’ [SW 3 496] While people were accustomed to such methods to fight a war, the task was to persuade peasants and trade unionists that comparable discipline and what he referred to as ‘new methods’, which clearly incorporated detailed direction from above, were still needed. [SW 3 497–9] ‘We must convince both workers and peasants that, without a new combination of forces, new forms of state amalgamation, and the forms associated with compulsion, we shall not escape the abyss of economic collapse on the brink of which we are standing’. [SW 3 500] ‘To accomplish this transition’, Lenin continued, ‘the peasants’ participation in it must be ten times as much as in the war. The war could demand, and was bound to demand, part of the adult male population. However, our country, a land of peasants which is still in a state of exhaustion, has to mobilize the entire male and female population of workers and peasants without exception. It is not difficult to convince us Communists, workers in the Land Departments, that state labour conscription is necessary.’ [SW 3 500–1] In sentences reminiscent of the collectivization drive of 1929 Lenin argued:

Comrades, here is what I particularly want to bring home to you now that we have turned from the phase of war to economic development. In a country of small peasants, our chief and basic task is to be able to resort to state compulsion in order to raise the level of peasant farming
… We shall be able to achieve this only when we are able to convince millions more people who are not yet ready for it. We must devote all our forces to this and see to it that the apparatus of compulsion, activated and reinforced, shall be adapted and developed for a new drive of persuasion. [SW 3 502]

Once again, with disarming naivety, Lenin reveals interlocking strength and weakness, the strength of conviction to push ahead, the weakness that ‘compulsion’ and ‘persuasion’ are considered siblings not opposites. The besetting problem of Leninism was that the greater the compulsion used, the greater the resentment aroused and consequently the lesser the desired effect of persuasion. The fact that Lenin’s lengthy speech ended with a peroration to electrification and future technical marvels merely coated the pill. The machine of productionism was in full swing and labour conscription was one of its proposed weapons. Politics was cer
tainly not giving way to economics at this point. In fact, when the moment came to enact measures to carry out the above policies, labour conscription had disappeared from the agenda. Opposition to it had been too great and, in combination with the fragile state of the working class and industry and the need to improve food supply, it had inflicted another, unacknowledged, defeat on Lenin. Economic compulsion took a back seat until one of its master organizers came to power at the end of the decade. Even Stalin, however, did not contemplate universal labour conscription although the gulag has sometimes been seen to incorporate elements of it.