Revolution and Tyranny

...As a prominent Menshevik remarked: "Plekhanov was respected, Martov was loved, but only Lenin was followed unquestioningly, as if he were the sole undisputed leader...

...Whereas Marx saw the revolutionary spirit of the workers as a spontaneous product of the economic conditions in which they lived, Lenin insisted that "class consciousness can only be brought to the worker from the outside," that is, by the members of his own underground party...

...By the time Lenin died,' Professor Ulam observes in The Bolsheviks, "the character of the Soviet state was determined Lenin's concept of Party organization led logically to the emergence of one supreme leader...

...Eight years later, Nikita Khrushchev denounced him for "abuses of power and mass oppression against decent Soviet people.' Stalin's body was removed from its place of honor beside that of Lenin and buried under a modest stone a short distance away, next to the Kremlin wall...

...The climax was reached in the Great Purge, in essence a bloody pogrom carried out by the Philistines against the intellectuals and Westernizers of Old Bolshevism...

...Though the ground Ulam covers in this thoughtful book has been explored by a number of writers in recent years, fresh insights nevertheless abound in every chapter...

...It begins with the sinister interpretation Payne places upon Lenin's proposal, shortly before his death in 1924, "to remove" Stalin from his post as General Secretary of the Party...

...A decade later, in the Great Purge, he murders the rest of the "Old Bolsheviks...

...For only Lenin represented that rare phenomenon, rare especially for Russia: that of being a man of iron will, of indomitable energy, who combined a fanatical faith in the movement and the cause with no less faith in himself...

...Stalin's rise and fall, as recounted by Payne, is a grisly tale of intrigue and assassination...

...When documentation is provided, it is often from sources of dubious worth...

...He could boast neither Lenin's personal magnetism and talent for improvisation nor Trotsky's brilliant literary and oratorical gifts...

...Stalin proceeded to glorify the Great Russian people, restoring to grace such national heroes as Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great and denouncing foreign culture in favor of native accomplishments...

...The 1930s saw the re-emergence of Holy Russia under the new ideological cloak of vulgarized Marxism...

...and these, in fact, are the most effective pages in the book, for Payne succeeds in evoking the full horror of those years...

...But the one-party system forged by Lenin at the beginning of the century remains intact...

...Though The Rise and Fall of Stalin is lively and readable, it is also, unfortunately, superficial and unduly melodramatic...

...We are tired of waiting," he declared to the moderates who protested that Russia was not ripe for a Socialist revolution...

...A more judicious analysis of Stalin's rise to total power would, moreover, have required fuller treatment of the great struggle between Stalin and Trotsky for Lenin's mantle as leader of the Party...

...Lenin, it seems, distorted the theories of his mentor no less than the "revisionists" whom he so virulently attacked...

...Reviewed by PAUL AVRICH Associate Professor, Queens College...

...One also regrets Payne's failure to relate the totalitarian nature of Stalin's rule to the legacy of his predecessor...

...This is the crucial question which Payne poses, but in the end he fails to come up with any convincing answers...

...To Sukhanov, the left Menshevik chronicler of the 1917 Revolution, Stalin was "a grey blur, which flickered obscurely and left no trace...

...In the course of his book, Payne manages to revive nearly every rumor ever circulated about Stalin, laying particular stress on those which reflect Stalin's nastiness and duplicity...

...Ulam attributes the unforeseen success of the Bolsheviks almost entirely to the extraordinary qualities of Lenin-his remarkable organizational abilities, his awareness of what could and could not be done at the given moment, his forceful personality, his proverbial will of iron...

...Lenin's greatest achievement was to adapt Marxism to the political and economic conditions of a relatively "underdeveloped" country where a proletarian revolution made little sense...

...But the activist in him won the upper hand...

...Lenin's deeply-ingrained elitism, his insistence upon centralized leadership and tight Party discipline, his bitter vituperation of his adversaries, his license of political terror, his suppression of a free press, his dissolution of the popularly elected Constituent Assembly-all of which were justified as short-term expedients required by an emergency situation-left an ineradicable stamp on the future development of the Bolshevik party and the Soviet state...

...How could this "small, brooding, pock-marked man with a crooked arm, black teeth, and yellow eyes," as Robert Payne describes him, have risen to the summit of power and become one of the greatest tyrants of our age...

...And in sharp contrast to Trotsky's faith in a worldwide Socialist revolution, Stalin's insistence that Russia could go it alone and create "Socialism in one country" brought behind him the tidal force of nationalism-the strongest political and cultural force of modern times...

...But Stalin, the son of an obscure Georgian cobbler and a man of modest intellectual attainments, cut an undistinguished figure in comparison with his fellow Party leaders...

...This was a program with deep roots in the Populist tradition...

...nor is there any discussion of Soviet foreign policy before World War II...

...The Bolsheviks, it seemed, would have little part to play in the fateful events unfolding in the Russian capital...

...The author, making profitable use of the voluminous memoir literature published in the Soviet Union before and after Stalin's reign, writes with an uncommon understanding of his tangled subject...

...Yet, barely eight months later, their strength increased tenfold, they were to overthrow the provisional government of Alexander Kerensky and embark upon the first full-scale venture in modern totalitarianism...

...And Stalin's ghost continues to haunt his countrymen...

...To adapt Marxism to the situation in Russia, Lenin added strong doses of native Russian Populism, a form of peasant Socialism which he had vehemently rejected as a young man...

...How then did his name come to inspire such terror and such devotion in the hearts of the Russian people...

...Given the author's marked taste for the lurid and sensational aspects of Stalin's career, it is not surprising that he should devote no less than 100 pages to the terrible bloodbath of the '30s...

...To delay the uprising would be a "crime...

...The Bolsheviks merits a place on the small shelf of works which shed new light on the origins and character of the Russian Communist party...

...Scarcely less remarkable than Lenin's "success story" is that of his heir to power, Joseph Stalin...

...Learning of Lenin's evil intentions, Stalin poisons the great leader...

...In February 1917, when a spontaneous revolt in Petrograd brought the Tsarist regime to dust, the Bolsheviks were a disorganized sect of political zealots, fewer than 25,000 strong, with their leaders languishing in Siberian exile or marooned in Western Europe...

...Yet Stalin was Trotsky's superior in precisely those respects which proved decisive in their contest for power: ideological flexibility, ruthless cunning, and the capacity to win the allegiance of the boorish Gletkins of the Party apparatus...

...He attempted to bring Socialism to his "backward" country by fusing the proletarian revolution with the revolutions of a land-hungry peasantry and a militant elite of d?©class?© intellectuals, social elements for which Marx had expressed only contempt...

...In the vocabulary of Russian Communism, says Payne, "to remove" can have only one meaning-"to liquidate...

...But in the end, according to Payne, Stalin is himself done to death by Lavrenti Beria, who in turn dies violently at the hands of Malenkov, Molotov, Mikoyan, and Khrushchev...

...While Trotsky held aloof from the humdrum tasks necessary in gathering organizational strength, Stalin gradually gained control of the day-to-day administration of Party affairs...

...contributor, "Slavic Review," "Russian Review," "Soviet Studies" The story of the Bolsheviks, in Professor Ulam's words, is "one of drama and success unparalleled in modern history...

...Stalin died in 1953, after a quarter-century of totalitarian rule...

...The Revolution, he now said, must be made by peasants as well as workers...

...Little attempt, however, is made to place these gory events within a meaningful context of political and economic developments...

...Dismissing Stalin as a serious rival, Trotsky labeled him "the most eminent mediocrity in the Party," a man "destined to play second or third fiddle...

...Is Stalin's place in history to be assessed without the collective farms and the Five-Year Plans, the Comintern and the Popular Front...

...Nor is it reassuring to find that, through an apparent oversight, the source references for four whole chapters have been omitted...

...In the 1870s, Peter Tkachev had written that a revolution in Russia could be brought about only by a highly organized and disciplined minority, a minority which "ought to have intellectual and moral power over the majority," and whose organization demanded "centralization, strict discipline, speed, decisiveness, and coordination of activities.' Some thirty years later, in his celebrated pamphlet What Is To Be Done?, Lenin employed nearly identical language to describe the clandestine organization he said was needed to overturn the existing order...

...We are told virtually nothing of Stalin's equally valid claim to distinction, namely his "second revolution" in agriculture and industry...

...moreover, it must be led by a disciplined organization of professional revolutionaries...

...The Marxist in Lenin, as Ulam suggests, told him to be patient, to let Russia evolve in accordance with the laws of historical materialism set forth in the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital...