Russia's Impermanent Revolution

...he joked, laughed, asked that I entertain him, offer him wine, and so on...

...Peasants born and raised in these communes, along with landless peasants in the Ukraine and in Siberia, where private ownership was far more common, formed the backbone of the Communist masses...

...In any case, argues the author, "most of the massacres were perpetrated not by Russian White troops but by Ukrainian irregulars and Cossacks...

...By November 1922, Lenin had turned against Stalin, but only, as Pipes emphasizes, because he did not like the way his eventual successor dealt with nationalist tendencies among Georgian Communists...

...Second, and more important, even its Russian population has been divided between two fundamentally incompatible groups since the days when Peter the Great tried to Westernize his domains...

...Nonetheless, virtually all of Stalin's crimes had Leninist precedents...

...After the liberation of the serfs in 1861, a large majority of the land in the provinces of Great Russia (albeit not in other parts of the empire) was given to communes rather than to individuals...

...The commander in Siberia, Aleksandr Kolchak, was "politically untutored" and fond of reading The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, yet according to Pipes "he made it clear that he would tolerate no anti-Jewish excesses...

...Richard Pipes' The Russian Revolution (1990) and his new Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (Knopf, 587 pp., $35.00), destined to replace Carr as the standard source on the subject, were written as Communism was expiring...

...Increasingly, says Pipes, he became "overwhelmed by a sense of failure...

...he simply wanted them handled more tactfully...

...Lenin also resorted to mass terror—arbitrary arrests and executions on a huge scale, the taking and shooting of hostages, reprisals—and justified its use in theory...

...Lenin's vision of a society transformed through technology was beyond their understanding...

...Stalin, shows Pipes, "played a brilliant game that deceived everyone, from Lenin down," and "cleverly outmaneuvered his rivals," including Trotsky...

...In his "Testament," dictated in late December 1922, Lenin urged Stalin's ouster primarily for personal faults: "Stalin is too coarse, and this shortcoming, fully tolerable within our midst and in our relations as Communists, becomes intolerable in the post of general secretary...

...Yet it is still widely supposed that the Reds won the subsequent Civil War because they were more popular or, at any rate, less unpopular than their White opponents...

...Lenin's sister wrote that during this period, he "met [Stalin] in a friendly manner...

...No other model of authority lay at hand...

...It didn't help that the White chieftains, fearing accusations of treason, refused to accommodate nationalists in Poland, Finland and Estonia...

...Their opponents fought from three geographically separate fronts—in the Ukraine, Siberia and the Northwest—and were unable to coordinate military activities...

...in the eyes of many it was an economic success...

...No masterwork has emerged...

...As a young man, Lenin had nevertheless argued that Russia was a mature capitalist society ready for a socialist revolution...

...Liberalism may not be triumphant today, but illiberalism no longer has the slightest claim to rationality...

...But they soon failed in their larger aims: igniting an explosion in the rest of Europe, particularly in Germany, and liberating Russia from its heritage of what Pipes calls "parri-monialism...

...At the start of Lenin's rule, the peasants were subjected to arbitrary grain requisitioning, which led to the famine of 1921, much as the Stalinist grain requisitioning of 1929 led to the famine of 1930...

...It remains a politically backward country with a lingering fondness for the knout and the lash and, despite appearances to the contrary, very weak feelings of nationhood: Its xenophobia and anti-Semitism are substitutes for patriotism, not expressions of it...

...They occurred anyway...

...That the author of those words was Mussolini does not diminish their validity...

...Carr published his three-volume Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, until recently perhaps the single most important work on the establishment of Leninism in Russia, the USSR was not merely a superpower...

...All of the White armies, he says, "promised to give the people of Russia an opportunity to decide freely on their form of government," assurances he seems to take at face value...

...77ze Russian Revolution took the story from the beginnings of radical agitation in the 1890s to the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd and central Russia in 1917-18...

...By 1921, Lenin himself admitted that he had made a "mistake" in counting on the ability "of the proletarian state to organize, by direct command, state production and state distribution of goods in a Communist manner in a country of small peasants...

...Stalin," concludes the author, "was a true Leninist in that he faithfully followed his patron's political philosophy and practices...

...he simply believed liberal societies were at a disadvantage to totalitarian ones in almost every way...

...Pipes' predecessors, especially Carr, saw that disaster as a permanent reality...

...Lenin didn't set out to revive and exploit traditional Russian attitudes toward government, yet their re-emergence was inevitable once the fantasies of Bolshevism had been exploded...

...In Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, the author points to other reasons for the Communists' victory...

...The most important force, in the Ukraine, was created by Mikhail V. Alekseev, a general who had played an important role in ousting the Tsar...

...Carr was a Soviet apologist, though not himself a Communist or even really a Leftist...

...It was Lenin who made Stalin general secretary of the Communist Party in April 1922, shortly before the old leader's first stroke...

...Their Bolshevism, however, consisted almost exclusively of resentment against the higher classes...

...Stalin, Lenin declared, should be replaced by a person with "greater patience, greater loyalty, greater courtesy and attentiveness to comrades, less capricious-ness, etc...

...The Westernizers, the liberals, and the economists are a minority cut off from their historic roots...

...Much as Lenin's system of government drew upon the practices and attitudes of its Tsarist predecessor, Stalinism, thinks the author, was rooted in Leninism, not a perversion of it...

...Pipes paid close attention to the February events...

...No doubt these divisions are less extreme today, yet they clearly persist...

...Consequently, most of them glossed over the first Russian Revolution of February 1917?although it led to the Tsar's abdication and the forming of the Provisional Government—and proceeded straight to the main event, Aleksandr Kerensky's overthrow by Lenin and his gang...

...Russia is further from having a civil society independent of the state now than in 1917...

...They also discussed Trotsky in my presence, and it was apparent here that Lenin sided with Stalin against Trotsky...

...The task has proved beyond his powers...

...They used terror much more systematically than their enemies did...

...While he may not have understood the implications of this act, from May to October 1922 Stalin was his "most frequent visitor" and "the only member of the Central Committee whom Lenin asked to see during the most serious stages of his illness...

...Every ingredient of what has come to be known as Stalinism save one—murdering fellow Communists —he had learned from Lenin...

...Another of his theories held, somewhat contradictorily, that an uprising there would spread to Germany, which would then lead Russia to socialism...

...And it has yet to be broken...

...It has long been apparent that the Bolshevik Revolution was essentially a putsch...

...This weakness has two causes...

...The Russian peasant of 1900 owed loyalty only to his village and canton...

...The peasants, as Pipes wrote in The Russian Revolution, "viewed their betters as aliens to whom they had to pay taxes and deliver recruits but with whom they had nothing in common...

...The artist has failed...

...A contemporary said of him at about this time, "Lenin is an artist who worked on humans as other artists work on marble or metal...

...The Bolshevik-ruled areas were more populous, so the Red Army always had a numerical advantage...

...Anton Den-iken, commander in the South, similarly "issued orders condemning the pogroms and calling for the perpetrators to be severely punished," but he too "was a weak, politically inexperienced man who had little control over the behavior of his troops...

...From the Tsars to Lenin to Stalin there is a clear line of continuity...

...There is another Russia, too anarchical and uneducated to form the basis of a modern state, but too large and above all too Russian for us to ignore...

...Though Pipes does not ignore the crimes and frailties of the Whites, he defends their cause...

...To be sure, Lenin was hostile to all such manifestations...

...Russia in 1917 was a poor, primitive society hardly ripe for capitalism, let alone socialism...

...But human beings are harder than granite and less malleable than iron...

...He discovered that they were not, as everyone had previously thought, a rebellion of peasant soldiers against World War I, but rather an attempt by pro-Allied officers and politicians to replace a regime that had prosecuted the War catastrophically—the latest in a string of failures, disgusting liberals and conservatives alike...

...The continuity between Tsarism and Leninism, besides taking obvious forms like the leader's autocratic rule, censorship and the unlimited demands of the state, extended to a relative scarcity of private property as we understand it in the West...

...In addition, the inhabitants of these areas were overwhelmingly Great Russians, whereas the Whites, operating in predominantly non-Russian territories, had to rely primarily on Cossacks and Ukrainians who were loyal to themselves, not to Russia...

...First, Russia was and is an empire, incorporating a large number of very different peoples, and its governments have always known that Russian nationalism was a threat to stability...

...In 1917 he acted upon this jumble of ideas...

...Against such opponents, the Bolsheviks succeeded in hanging on to power...

...The chief prosecutor of Lenin's political show trials, Nicholas Krylenko, played the same role in the Stalinist spectacles of the next decade...

...By 1917, only the elite had been transformed into Europeans...