The Soviet Party and Its Leaders
DANIELS, ROBERT V.
WRITERS and WRITING The Soviet Party and Its Leaders The Communist Party of the Soviet Union. By Leonard Schapiro. Random House. 631 pp. $7.50. Reviewed by Robert V. Daniels Assistant...
...Within these limits, the violent impact of Lenin's and Stalin's fanatic personalities cannot be gainsaid, but it would be more fruitful to inquire why the circumstances of the Russian Revolution enabled such people to succeed as they did...
...However, something is still lacking in this contemporary image...
...He gives little weight to the authoritarian habits inherited from the Russian past, which no amount of revolutionary idealism could undo...
...Schapiro puts little emphasis on factors beyond Communist control, and thus reflects something of the spell of the Communist leaders' rational omniscience and omnipotence which has so often paralyzed critical understanding of the subject among Americans...
...There is truth in the patently un-Marxian hero-worship trumpeted in Communist hagiog-raphy: Without Lenin, there would have been no Soviet state and no Communist movement: without Stalin, Communism would never have achieved its spectacular successes and crimes...
...the Communists under Lenin's leadership determined to seize and hold power no matter what, and their corruption followed with appropriate logic...
...In detail it is among the best histories of Soviet Russia which have ever appeared, even though in its overall impact it does not fully convey the millenial tragedy of perverted ideals which is the essence of the Communist movement...
...Russia in revolution was bound to fall under one dictatorial regime or another...
...Schapiro hopefully concludes, a new post-Stalin generation is on the way whose minds are not likely to "remain limited by the rules for an underground conspiracy as once formulated by Lenin...
...Stalinist totalitarianism would never have been invented had it not been for the challenge and stresses of industrialization which confronted the revolutionary regime...
...The only motive visible among the inhabitants of this mechanical monster is power—seizure of power by the Party, maintenance of power by the leaders, struggle for power among bureaucratic cliques, propagandistic manipulation of ideas for power's sake, enlargement of international power for the system as a whole...
...Viewing Soviet developments from the standpoint of the Party's power and responsibility, Schapiro offers a panoramic sweep of 40 years of history, with particular and proper emphasis on the institutions and individuals really responsible for making Soviet history...
...Schapiro's history is one of the outstanding works in this vein—a solid and mature introduction to the study of Communism...
...Schapiro views the Great Purges of 1936-38 as Stalin's "victory over the party," which broke its power as an institution and cleared the way for the despotic personal rule which lasted until Stalin lay on his deathbed...
...These limitations in Schapiro's history are not his own, but are inherent in the body of historical scholarship and sociological assumption on which his work rests...
...It is almost too easy to cast the history of the CPSU in terms of its dominant personalities, as Schapiro has done...
...Stalin's place in the post-Lenin period is a familiar story, set forth by Schapiro in all its Byzantine horror...
...Schapiro confesses his "old-fashioned" point of view—"respect for human life and dignity, freedom of thought and speech, justice, truth, and peace between man and man...
...Again, in the Revolution and after, it was Lenin's unshakable will to rule that carried the Bolsheviks to power and kept them there against all odds and despite the qualms that afflicted almost every one of Lenin's followers at one time or another...
...Schapiro has no patience with historians—no doubt he has E. H. Carr and Isaac Deutscher in mind—who absolve individuals of responsibility for the unpleasant consequences of their actions by appealing to inevitable laws of history, the truly fallacious assumption "that because things happened in a certain way therefore they had to happen in this way, irrespectively of the political actions of man...
...Communism originated as the fanatic pursuit of an ideal, corrupted by the circumstances and tactics of the effort...
...In company with most of the American school of Kremlin-ology, Schapiro does not really penetrate the Communist mind...
...The pragmatic leaders of the movement adapted to circumstances in order to hold power, with the result that a self-styled workers' international revolutionary movement was transformed into the imperialistic and bureaucratic totalitarianism we know today...
...The most recent phase of Soviet Communism again bears the mark of an individual personality, with the ascendency of Khrushchev...
...Schapiro has fashioned an impressive work of synthesis which testifies to his own outstanding skill and objectivity as an historian, as well as to the wealth of recently accumulated scholarship on which he drew...
...As Communism evolved, its leaders developed a mentality of dogmatic irrationality, pretending that the end product of the evolution corresponded to the original scheme and justifying it accordingly...
...Once he was firmly in the saddle, he commenced the liquidation not only of his old rivals, but of most of his supporters as well...
...Schapiro has not given much space to these oppositionists of the Left and Right prior to the spectacular Trotsky-Stalin duel, though to my mind they constitute a vital part of the history of Communism...
...What animates and sustains the revolutionary movement before, during and after the seizure of power...
...The end product is indeed close to the soulless control machine posited in the prevailing academic model of Communism...
...Present-day Communism is the result of complex historical evolution, whose final form was never foreseen and scarcely desired by the founders of the movement, whatever their heirs may claim...
...As Schapiro points out, the history of the Communist party is inseparable from the history of the Soviet system as a whole...
...He stands firmly with Actonian liberalism— power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely...
...Nothing can be organized or accomplished in the Soviet Union outside the purview of the Party, and it and its leaders can justly be held accountable for the profound changes—for better or for worse—which have occurred in Soviet society since the Revolution...
...He overlooks the violent impact of the Russian Civil War, which recast the Communist movement in a militaristic form undreamed of by its founders...
...As Schapiro demonstrates with compelling detail, the Bolshevik faction was created by Lenin not over fundamental differences of principle, but simply because Lenin could never share power or cooperate with an equal...
...Almost every major revolution in history, right down to Cuba today, has lifted unscrupulous egomaniacs into the seats of power...
...Nevertheless, it is not enough to explain the Soviet system by Lenin and Stalin alone...
...Reviewed by Robert V. Daniels Assistant Professor of History, University of Vermont...
...Here is the reason, unexplained by Schapiro, for the Communists' distortion of the past which requires us to write their own true history for them...
...In each stage of Soviet history, individuals have merely translated the potential into the actual, or chosen among alternatives which the conditions of society have posed for them...
...By themselves each of these points is valid...
...Laws" or social tendencies or widespread social circumstances do, in fact, shape the course of events to a great degree (though never exclusively...
...Scha-piro's treatment of post-Stalin developments is modestly termed an "epilogue," but is nevertheless the best I have seen...
...the error is to exaggerate them and neglect the broader human context...
...A milestone in this endeavor is Leonard Schapiro's new book, the first substantial and comprehensive history of the Communist party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) ever produced by a non-Communist author...
...In his reaction against "laws" that exculpate individuals, Schapiro saddles individuals with all the blame, and implies that the right hero could have solved every Russian problem painlessly...
...The power struggles and control mechanisms with which Anglo-American Kremlinology is obsessed are, to be sure, one important aspect of the Communist system...
...Stalin rose to power as the personal embodiment of the Party organization and its principles of discipline...
...The impact of individual personality in history was never so clear as in the origin of Russian Communism...
...They could not make history out of whole cloth no matter what superhuman virtues and evils may be imputed to them by their admirers and enemies...
...Author, "A Documentary History of Communism' The serious study of Communism has been pursued on a large scale in the West for scarcely a dozen years...
...In judging Communism...
...Schapiro has nothing to say, for instance, on the social psychology of Revolution and the Communists' similarities with other revolutionary movements...
...Neither the strengths nor the weaknesses of Communism will be understood as long as we insist in regarding the movement as nothing but the execution of a blueprint for domination and control...
...The image of Communism transmitted in volume after volume and in learned article after learned article of American research on the Soviet system is one of a clanking mountain of machinery, so crowded with control wires and communications channels that it looks like the inside of a New York manhole, deftly steered along by a lever-pulling individual at the top who keeps his eyes on the road-map of world conquest while his ambitious lieutenants play king-of-the-mountain...
...The Party gets its tone from its top personalities, but...
...The Party is the ruling mechanism in a totalitarian society, no facet of which lies beyond the power of Party leaders to influence or command...
...Lenin's personal role is all the more striking in the light of the resistance he had to overcome in his own Party...
...he has not captured the human forces in the movement—the passion of Revolution, the bitterness of Civil War, or the self-righteousness of latter-day Soviet officialdom...
...What ideals and emotions enable such individuals to win the allegiance of large numbers of people...
...Totalitarianism, for example, is not just the work of madmen, but a dangerous modern social malady which has appeared in various places in various forms...
...Khrushchev, Schapiro finds, has not merely liberalized the Soviet regime by curbing the police, criticizing Stalin and letting foreign visitors in, he has revived the Party as an institution, so much so that it now has more influence than ever before in its history: ". . . For all his great power, Stalin's successor at the head of the party, unlike Stalin, governed through and with the party, and not as Stalin before him, over its head...
Vol. 43 • July 1960 • No. 29
