The Death of Utopianism:

...Nearly half of the book is taken up with the struggle within the Communist party...

...another, entitled “Revitalizing the Soviets,” gives a detailed account of the development of the Soviet administration at the lower levels...

...The remainder deals with government and administration...

...The great mass of the Russian people, their hardships, their apathies and their aspirations are ignored, except in so far as they form the raw material on which that leadership and those institutions had to work...

...To most of the spectators, and even to the principal actors, the ultimate implication of these moves was not apparent...

...The case of Trotsky, however, was only one facet in the building of the monolithic Party and equally absorbing is Carr’s masterly account of the defeat of Kamenev and Zinoviev, of the background and proceedings of the 14th Party Congress, in December 1925, and of the final ousting of Zinoviev from his command of the Leningrad Party machine...

...The concentration of power in the central organization also meant the concentration of power in the hands of one man...

...It was inevitable that clashes of policies and personalities should occur within a leadership whose main bond of unity, perhaps, was the determination to consolidate the Parly’s absolute hegemony...

...In November 1924, Trotsky broke the long silence following his declaration of submission at the 13th Party Congress in May by the publication of his Lessons of October with its sharp attacks on the behavior of leading Old Bolsheviks during 1917...

...By the same token, no other party leader could stand up against Stalin...

...By 1925 all non-Bolshevist opposition inside Russia had been effectively destroyed, and the main target of the OGPU became actual or potential opposition within the Party...

...on the economic front NEP had been introduced and was beginning to show results...

...But the hopes of what still survived of humanitarian idealism were doomed to disappointment...

...When Zinoviev, after his defeat at the 14th Congress, was finally ousted from his control of the Leningrad machine, and Kirov, a faithful Stalinist, was transferred from Baku to Leningrad to replace him, no local party organization was any longer strong enough to resist the central authority of Moscow...

...One chapter covers the Union and the Republics...

...His subject is the mechanics of the Soviet leadership and the growth of Soviet institutions as revealed by Soviet sources...

...These moves toward the beginning of the dictatorship were paralleled by the development of what was to become Stalin’s most formidable instrument...

...On the creation of the USSR the GPU became the OGPU, enshrined by name in the Constitution, and an independent department of the USSR with an ever-widening sphere of competence...

...The GPU, officially and permanently established, took over all powers enjoyed by the Cheka and emancipated itself from any judicial revision...

...Carr’s account of Trotsky at this period will inevitably invite comparison with Isaac Deutscher’s The Prophet Unarmed...

...the Polish War and such internal disturbances as the Kronstadt and Tambov uprisings and the Basmachi revolt in Turkestan...

...However, just when the position called for decisive action, Trotsky’s “next move once more seemed cryptic and undecipherable...

...but at the same time Russia was miserably backward and miserably poor...

...As Carr sums up: “It was not understood that Uglanov now ruled Moscow in succession to Kamenov as an agent of Stalin, and that this had enabled Stalin to confront the Leningrad opposition with the dual strength and authority of the Moscow organization and of the central party machine...

...For all the qualities of the latter work, Carr’s greater immunity from partisanship and from Marxist romanticism will cause many readers to find his version more satisfying...

...By 1924 the Soviet regime had weathered the Civil War...

...He went off to Berlin to consult his doctors, and the opportunity was missed...

...Somewhat more than a year later, following the rift within the Triumvirate, he appeared to be making a bid to return to the center of the political scene, and took the first steps towards reconciliation with Kamenev and Zinoviev...

...The logical consequence . . . was the adoption of the criminal code of May 1922 which brought all crimes whether against individual persons and property or against public security within the scope of the statute law and the same courts...

...This led, in January 1925, to his removal from the chairmanship of the Revolutionary Military Council and from his office of People’s Commissar for War...

...With Lenin out of the way (to the relief of some readers) Carr’s approach is severely impersonal...

...Both administrative action and the special procedure of the revolutionary tribunals for dealing with counter-revolutionary crimes appeared to have been eliminated from the Soviet system...

...most of the population of the huge empire was, if not hostile, at best apathetic...

...In all their innumerable and urgent practical problems its leaders were faced with a pitiful shortage both of material resources and of personnel qualified to undertake even subordinate tasks...

...But within these self-imposed limitations this is a masterly account of a period which marked the final withering away of revolutionary utopianism and the early development of the Soviet regime as we have come to know it...

...The bogey of attack from the imperialist powers was receding...

...Active support for the regime came only from the few...

...Antony’s College, Oxford University THIS, THE SIXTH volume of E. H. Carr’s great work on the first 12 years of Soviet Russia, shows all the exhaustive research, the mastery of source material and the lucidity and brilliance of exposition that its predecessors have led us to expect...

...A system of individual leaders cannot exist, and will not, no, will not” was Mikhail Tomsky’s passionate, and sincere, belief...

...Fifty pages are devoted to an examination of the Red Army, and the final chapter, “Order and Security,” traces the growth and consolidation of the powers of the OGPU...

...As shown in Carr’s final section, the Cheka, originally “a provisional expedient adapted to a period of disorder and civil war,” was abolished in February 1922 and replaced by the GPU as a regular department of the Commissariat of the Interior...

...The story of these clashes forms an absorbingly interesting part of this particular volume...