RUSSIA: The Root & the Flower

Thirty years ago a stooped man with hollow cheeks and a potbelly came out from behind the bookstacks, where he had spent most of his life, and kidnaped a state. Never before or after did he fire a gun or throw a bomb or raise his slim-fingered hands to strike a blow. In his name, nevertheless, more men have been slaughtered than in Attila’s. His name was Lenin.*

In the bookstacks, he had read Bakunin, who dreamed of absolute freedom; Marx, who dreamed of absolute politico-economic science; and Rousseau, who dreamed of justice. More important, he had read the Prussian General Karl von Clausewitz, who dreamed of power. The more Lenin schemed and struggled (in the bookstacks) for the revolution, and was thwarted, the more he thought of power. He made marginal notes on Clausewitz. “How true!” Lenin wrote. “Clever and witty.” Admiringly, he summed up a Clausewitzian point: “War as a part of a whole, and that whole—politics!”

In February 1917, the Russian people, without any help from Lenin, made a revolution that overthrew the Czar, freed political prisoners, speech and press, and organized the first and last free election in Russia’s history. The Russians knew what they wanted, but Lenin knew better. A Lenin dictum was: “The people themselves do not know what is good or bad for them.”

“A Worry of the Future.” Lenin organized not a people’s but a plotter’s revolution. One night, eight months after the February revolution, his men seized the key points in Petrograd. They grabbed the telegraph office in order to “telegraph the revolution to the provinces.” Soon afterwards, a Lettish regiment (controlled by the Bolshevik Party) and the sailors of Kronstadt dispersed the freely elected Constituent Assembly in which his Bolsheviks had only a 26% minority.

All over the world, millions of people (including some who were rather disappointed in his successor Stalin) came to revere Lenin as an idealist who believed in freedom and justice for the common man. Perhaps he did. He also believed in black neckties with little white flowers, and almost always wore them. Both these beliefs were irrelevant to what Lenin really stood for. He stood for the use, by any means, of power over people.

¶ He said: “There are no morals in politics ; there is only expediency. A scoundrel may be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel.”

¶ He said: “It does not matter that Comrade Krassikov has squandered party funds in a brothel, but it is scandalous that this should have disorganized the transportation of illegal literature.”

¶ He said: “It would be better to shoot those two, hold these five, let the rest go.”

¶ He said: “Revolutionaries should start training for war immediately, by means of practical operations: killing a spy, blowing up a police station, robbing a bank to provide funds for the uprising, etc. … Do not shrink from these experimental attacks; they may, of course, degenerate into excesses, but that is a worry of the future.”

Whoever understands the lust for power that Lenin generated in the bookstacks understands everything the Reds have done since. There have been some changes, but no surprises. Comrade Krassikov and his incontinent ilk have been liquidated. The party is pure—purely for power.

Second Glance. On last week’s anniversary of Lenin’s revolution, the party surveyed its 30 years of stewardship and found it good. Observers with other standards than Clausewitz’ might be pardoned a second glance at the record.

The top Soviet ration, for heavy workers, is now 2,340 calories a day. Growing children get 1,114 calories and dependents 892. The five rooms of an average small American family would, by Soviet standards, have had to house 14 people in 1928, 17 people in 1934, 20 people in 1937 and, with wartime destruction and slow reconstruction, 30 people in 1947. Russians are the worst-clothed people in Europe, even more ragged than in 1917.

The average Soviet worker can buy 22½ one-pound loaves of white bread with his week’s pay while the average U.S. worker can buy 394 with his. The Russian’s weekly pay will buy 8.4 lbs. of beef, the American’s 81.8. The Russian has to work seven weeks to buy one shoddy suit, the American one week to buy a good suit.

Industrial increase over Czarist Russia though considerable has been far less than Soviet claims. If Lenin had stayed in the bookstacks and Russian industry kept on developing merely at the prerevolution rate Russia would have a much greater industry than that reached by the Soviets−at a far lower human cost.

“Ideological Purity.” Dismal as the Soviet material record was, the rest was worse. The Czar sent thousands to live in Siberia, and some of them, like Lenin, took along their libraries. Stalin sent millions to die in Siberian labor camps, and most of them died quickly and horribly.

On their 30th anniversary, the Communists picked the flower of their leadership to herald their triumph. Molotov was boastful and truculent by turns, and he told the Russian people a misleading half-truth (see INTERNATIONAL). The anniversary’s order of the day came from Nikolai Alexandrovich Bulganin. No professional soldier, he served in World War II as a boss of the political commissars, who looked over the shoulders of the fighting men. Last week Bulganin was made a Marshal of the Soviet Union for preserving “the ideological purity of the armed forces at the end of the war.” He stood in the cultural ruins of the nation of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and called the Soviet Union “a country of advanced Socialist culture, a bulwark of world progress and civilization.”

This was something to rejoice over, and the people of Russia went about the business of rejoicing—as vigorously as one can on an average 1,500 calories a day.

Champagne & Sausage?. In Moscow slogans fluttered everywhere. Cloth that might have shielded shabby workers from the biting winter was daubed with likenesses of Marx, Lenin, Stalin and minor Soviet gods, and hung on buildings. Materials and labor skills which could have made houses everyone needed were used to construct gay, quaint booths for tea street fairs, where felt-booted citizens who tired of street dancing in the light November slush could buy (at fantastic prices) champagne, vodka, soda pop, bread and sausage. Truck-borne roving players mimed and capered on eleven bunting-draped stages in public squares. Fifty-three bands washed the Kremlin’s golden domes with music. For three days factory wheels were still, and bureaucrats mercifully stopped pushing their pens. And on the fourth day, hungover citizens, still—as always—faintly hungry, went back to work.

On the anniversary, Prime Minister Attlee and President Truman sent greetings to the Russian people, who well deserved them. With a courage that the world would never forget they had survived the power grab of Clausewitz’ disciples from the military colleges and beer halls of Germany. With luck, some of them might even survive what was let loose 30 years ago when a potbellied disciple of Clausewitz came out from behind the bookstacks.

* First used in the revolutionary magazine Dawn in December 1901, when Lenin, born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, adopted an underground party name—as Stalin, Trotsky, Molotov and many others did.