The ABC’s of Communism Bolshevism 2011

Jason W. Smith, Ph.D.

 

Part II – Socialist Transition

The Early Period: Proletarian Revolution and the Third International

 

Chapter 13: The Stage of Stalinist Socialism

Understanding Bolshevik Success at Revolution

In the beginning of any scientific study we need both a “model” and some “keys.” Therefore, understanding Bolshevik success at revolution requires our understanding of the model being followed by them and certain pedagogical keys.

The Model

At the turn of the last century (~1903) the model the Bolshevik leader V. I. Lenin, was following, was the theoretical model left by Karl Marx (Capital, Volumes 1, 2 and 3; The Civil War in France: the Paris Commune and Critique of the Gotha Programme) and the real world model left by the Parisian proletariat known as The Paris Commune. Most importantly, Lenin had Marx’s initial commentary on what Communists wanted (e.g., Chapter 2 page 22 of The Communist Manifesto) and Marx’s analysis of the Paris Commune (The Civil War in France) with his commentary on lessons learned in Paris in 1870-71, for future reference. Also, the implied model, that is to say the model inherent in what Marx had to say against the plans of the evolutionary socialists (a la the classical revisionists Bernstein and Kautsky and the Latter Day “modern” Revisionists Nikita Khrushchev and his Gringo stooge Gus Hall) in papers such as Critique of the Gotha Program.

The broader theoretical model was Marx’s (and Engels’) theory of historical materialism where “stages” in the advance in the means and relations of production was the practical side of Marxism. By “practical” we mean just about everybody could understand the concept of society evolving from one stage of the way people earn a living, and the social relations they must then enter into, to another stage. Acceptance of this theoretical model by European and New World workers was perhaps the most important achievement as the actual physical, real world, of the Party of Labor – i.e., the (First) International Workingmen’s Association.

For example, “just about everybody” included the American lawyer and politician, not to mention millionaire, Lewis Henry Morgan. Morgan in several books, most importantly in Ancient Society (1877), had come to these same conclusions independently. Morgan was working from the other end of the prehistoric-historic continuum than Marx and Engels. Morgan had reconstructed prehistoric sociocultural evolution as society evolving from one stage of the food procurement arts to the next and more advanced stage, as a matter of sociocultural evolutionary “law.” Thus Morgan was absorbed into the pantheon of Marxist “classics” despite his very Anglo conservative protestant gringo way of thinking.

At any rate, this “practicality” was how Marxism came to be understood by social thinkers.

In our time, for example, this has meant the understanding that Band and Tribal hunting and gathering gives way to the Band and Tribal agricultural revolution, which itself gives way to Simple and Advanced Chiefdoms and finally to class and state society (the sequential stages of Slavery, Feudalism and Capitalism.)

But, in those days, we had only the historical record, for what it was worth, to guide us with regard to how a society might look where the state was owned by the people rather than a select group of social criminals. With only this latter historical record the outlook for people’s power might have led some of us to psychological depression.

Then Karl Marx had come along and shown us that the emergence of capitalism and its general crisis, brought along with it, its own grave diggers (industrial workers). Marx proved these workers had a survival interest in a future of science and education, if they were to cease being wage slaves and instead become masters of the universe. Furthermore, one didn’t have to wait until some mythical event (e.g., the “second coming”) because the agents of change were here at hand, already among us! All you had to do was to organize them. This could provide a way out!

However, our ideas about what a worker’s government and state should actually, exactly, look like, over a century ago, were rather primitive (in say 1900), because our level of experience was rudimentary. In the meantime, the Russian Marxists confronted both incipient syndicalism and evolutionary socialism in their own ranks, as worker’s parties did throughout Europe, but in their own peculiar form. Russian evolutionary socialists wanted to work toward a system such as the German Marxists (German Social Democratic Party) had achieved with a role in Government allowing much of the Party’s social welfare program to be put into effect. – And, the “economic wing” of the Russian Party wanted to concentrate solely on trade union issues (a kind of syndicalist pandering to those who wanted to avoid armed confrontation with the capitalist state in any way possible.)

Furthermore, Russian experience at fighting tyrants had centered on armed confrontations between the Czarist state (Army and Okhrana police) and bomb throwing anarchists. While Russian Marxists disagreed altogether with the idea of terrorism against the Czar as the winning strategy, many of them including V. I. Lenin were very empathetic with the bomb throwers, because of their personal life experiences. Accordingly Lenin was open to ideas about violent action to secure funding for his Party. All of this taken together constitutes the “model” of what Marxists behind V. I. Lenin were working to achieve, and the path to doing so.

The Keys

In any scientific study there will be keys a scholar can follow to understand the principle causes and process involved in specific examples of (in this case, sociocultural) evolution. In the case of Bolshevism, I shall save you the time of having to decide which might be the best threads to follow by telling you the result of some five decades of research on my part. This research and my personal experience tells me that the two keys to follow are the two men, Lenin and Stalin.

The Russian Marxists were divided into two broad social class groupings. The intellectual leaders of privileged social backgrounds, most of whom had had to flee into exile, and the at-home on the ground leadership, often of less privileged social backgrounds, that stayed inside the Empire of the Russia’s most of their lives and conducted a violent, clandestine, armed struggle against the state apparatus of the capitalists and their noble-aristocrat allies. This latter group made all the difference in the way the Russian Marxists led by V. I. Lenin were able to engineer an armed seizure of power for the intellectual leaders to build upon.

In Western Europe (e.g., Italy, France, England and Germany) the evolutionary socialists and the syndicalist types could go to the semi-legal unions for money and support to run candidates and campaigns for different kinds of workers’ rights and welfare programs. This source was unavailable to the equivalent types (evolutionary socialists and syndicalist) among Russia’s Social Democratic Labor Party leaders. There were no legal unions. So, if some Bolshevik intellectuals were inclined to participate in Parliamentary maneuvering (as for example in the Czarist Duma, when and if it was allowed to assemble) they had to get the money from some other source.

The head of the Bolshevik Party was V. I. Lenin. He was the chief (1) of the Bolshevik intellectuals and (2) as importantly of the armed robbery teams. Lenin’s principle instrument leading the intellectual fight from abroad would be political Newspapers and Journals. The head of the on-the-ground finance resource identification (robbery) teams was Leonid Krassen whose main pupil, Joseph Stalin, would provide Lenin with all the cash he needed to try and make the Bolshevik action program work.

When Lenin wanted the Bolsheviks to be in the Duma, those wishing to participate under the Bolshevik label within the Duma had to go to Lenin to get the money. Lenin always had the money. Why? Because Lenin had his own team of bank robbers, and stage coach and steamship robbers, at work holding up banks and conducting a variety of armed robberies to provide the cash for these and many other Party activities (the Press, the salaries and support finances of leaders and cadre, participation in electoral campaigns and so forth.) To get this money Lenin relied on Stalin.

Following the careers of these two men will enable you students just coming on board to quickly weave your way through the morass of violently differing interpretations in the highly politicized academic history of modern Russia and Bolshevism. Accordingly, in this Handbook we shall focus frequently on the activities of these two leaders of our Party.

However, before Lenin there was Karl Marx. He is your key to understanding the history of Labor Movement in the 1800’s. (Marx died in 1883). Lenin was thirteen years old and Stalin three. There is, accordingly, a short pedagogical gap which I shall try and fill-in as we proceed.

Self-Aware Labor’s First half century (1848 – 1903)

I want you to think for a moment of that fictional event when robotic cybernetic organisms become “self-aware.” You have read about this for many decades (Asimov’s stories for example) and seen it in movies (e.g., Terminator series). Now think of the new class of proletarians becoming self-aware of themselves as people with a distinct relationship to the means of production. Remember that awareness of oneself as an owners and seller of labor power is not an inherent aspect of daily work. For people have been performing concrete labor since their earliest ape-like days. When people became agriculturalists they were not selling their labor-power in the capitalist way (the only fundamental definition of proletarian) and even when they were enslaved their first thought could not have featured their labor-power as a commodity for self-sale for as slaves their relationship to the means of production was far more primitive – i.e., chattel slavery itself is only a precursor to wage-slavery – a completely distinct category, as the slave does not own his/her labor-power.

Becoming self-aware of their new status as the “free” owners of the homogenized form of their labor (the average output of a factory bench system where the regulation of the output is by the factory clock and reimbursement comes in the form of wages) meant understanding all of this. Then it meant acting on that understanding by collective work actions – stoppages, sabotage, sit-ins, education and other cooperative undertakings.

Marx met Engels in December of 1842, and the two of them realized they had independently come to the same conclusions about the real world, how its social evolution had occurred (specifically, the “cultural” evolution of technology, social organization and ideology) and how capitalism itself functioned. In January of 1848 they published their “call” to change to world we know as the Communist Manifesto. That same month a series of popular revolts led by this new and now increasingly self-aware proletariat swept across Western Europe beginning in southern Italy. Only the English ruling class was able to ride that bucking bronco without being thrown for a loop. We usually refer to the period 1848-1850 as the Revolutions of 1848.

The First International

Workers in Europe and the New World realized as part of their self-awareness that the capitalists were shipping some of them from one country to another in order to drive down wages and/or break strikes. Even the most conservative trade unionists felt threatened. Thus from left to right (i.e., Marxists to Trade Union pie-cards) by 1864 all of these workers in advanced countries and their leaders had taken self-awareness to its next logical step – which, of course, would be the establishment of organizational form(s) to prevent this from happening and to go over to a self-aware “class” offensive against capital by pooling funds to support each other’s strike funds. In 1864 some of them gathered in London and attending was Karl Marx. To make a longer story short, suffice to say Marx became the leader of this the (first) International Association of Workingmen and Frederick Engels became the Chief of the General Staff of the “new proletarian army.” (I recommend the recent biography of Frederick Engels for those of you interested in him and his critical role as Marx’s General in a book by that name (by Tristam Hunt, 2009, Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt Co. New York.)

Political Consciousness Emerges from Class Self-Awareness

1876 to 1903

The First International lasted only twelve years. Twelve critical years where Marx and his theory of historical materialism and his theory of capitalism came to dominate the thought of working people in most of Europe. Only in Spain and parts of Italy was there a competing ideology and that was anarchism. By sending the General Council of the First International to New York Marx managed to destroy the anarchist threat internally to Labor. But in its place there were numerous contending schools of thought in Europe. There was a great deal of confusion as we have seen and will review again at different points in this Handbook. However, what we see clearly with regard to self-aware labor at this point (c. 1876) is that working classes throughout the capitalist world (mainly Europe and the America’s) realized they had distinct class interests which required a distinct political party. The broad-spectrum of opinion as to what that Party of Labor should look like varied from country to country but pretty much all of the non-anarchist thinkers and leaders accepted some part if not all of Marx’s work.

A next step would be Marx’s attack on the “revisionists” of his time in a monograph that had to wait sixteen years for publication (the actual Congress was held in the German city of Gotha in 1875.) This kick off of the anti-revisionist struggle is known as Critique of the Gotha Program.)

The 1903 Organizational Steps to Leninism

The biggest capitalist countries of the Old World were England, Germany, Italy, France, and Russia. It was in Russia that labor was at its weakest. Yet it would be the Russians who first overthrew capitalism! The reason was simple enough and comes in the form of one person – Vladimir Illych Ulyanov who we know as V.I. Lenin. The first organizational step along the correct Marxist (non-revisionist) road was the formation of the Bolshevik Party which began in the 1903 RSDLP Congress in London. After that point the Bolsheviks were always a de facto separate Party and as such they became the only true Party of Labor in Europe.

The split with Anarchism, Syndicalism, and Reformism

We have seen in the preceding chapter (12) that the emergence of capitalism with its five minimal technological achievements occurred by 1765 in Western Europe. While all of these criteria [(i) blast furnace iron and steel, (ii) machine tools, (iii) machinery, (iv) independent power, (v) factory installation of machinery], had been individually invented much earlier in China, the relative political-economic strength of the new capitalist owners of those Chinese factories was infinitesimally less in that same year (1765) than the economic and financial strength of the Chinese agricultural slave and serf, owners and masters, (and their eunuch bureaucracy governing the Chinese Empire.)

Accordingly, on a global scale, the first successful political steps toward bourgeois emancipation from aristocratic-noble ruling class dictatorship over feudal society occurred in Europe rather than China.

You can’t have capitalism without workers so bourgeois success in Europe and the Americas brought along with it the specter of working class emancipation in Europe.

Why?

Because in Europe, as opposed to China, the technological and social organizational base for bourgeois exploitative society was far weaker (for the emerging capitalists and, for that matter, for the landed nobility as well), vis a vis the relative strength of the workers. For example, Chinese rulers had total control over massive irrigation agriculture, not to mention complete control of internal transportation via a massive system of canals and interlinked rivers. Whereas European rulers had at best, some poorly maintained roads.

Relatively strong working classes were here to stay in industrializing Europe, and the bourgeoisie had to get used to them and put up with their demands – at least more than they would have liked too.

In a new industrializing working class situation the very first step one must take is to educate those who have no choice but to fight for a new world and put an end to the evil old world of capitalism. We had to have an educated body of workers and this meant we had to get educated ourselves. We had to have a science of society and its evolution. We got that science in the initial work of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels who were accordingly the first anthropological theoreticians.

To Recap

Intellectual First Step – 1842 – Founding our Science

Historical Materialism - i.e., the Laws of History – the practical side of Marxism

The first step was the discovery by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels that human society evolved from one socioeconomic stage to another via the mechanism anthropologists would come to call culture. Culture in this sense was first defined by Marx and Engels. First of all they saw culture as that learned behavior passed down from one generation to the next, always having an identical structure: a mode of production and a superstructure.

The mode of production for any stage (e.g., the stages of primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism or communism) has itself two components which Marx and Engels called the means of production and the relations of production. Many decades later, and to make Marxism acceptable in Gringolandia, Leslie A. White substituted the terms technology and social organization for means of production and relations of production.

Marx and Engels placed human world views (philosophy, religion, superstitious belief systems, ideology, etc.) in a category, schematically drawn to show it above and arising upon the mode of production.  Marx called this human consciousness world-view category, the superstructure. It was relabeled ideology by White.

Culture in anthropological science has these basic components first discovered by Marx and Engels:

                        Ideology = Superstructure

 Technology – Social Organization} = Mode of Production          

Marx and Engels met toward the latter part of 1842 in Paris and had gotten this far working independently. They teamed up, and over the next six years they produced the essential outlines of their unlocking of the secrets of capitalist production.

By 1844 they had written Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy which foreshadows the finalized version (Capital Volume One – 1867) by almost a quarter century. By 1848 they had taken on the principle contenders for leadership of the working class in Western Europe (Prodhounist anarchists in France and Lassalean revisionists in Germany). Next up to bat would be the next generation of European revisionists, but not quite yet.

Intellectual Step Two – The Communist Manifesto - 1848

From the Revolutions of 1848 to the First International (1864 – 1876)

  Workers rose up everywhere in Europe beginning in southern Italy in January of 1848 and these revolts continued in virtually every European capital and industrial city throughout the next two years. Two years later, that is after 1850, and the defeat of these insurrections, there followed years of serious suppression and political reaction then set in. The Revolutions of 1848 had been thoroughly crushed, with its leaders and members running for cover to friendlier European climes, but especially to the New World where everything from Gringo industrial expansion, to the theft of Northern Mexico, and finally the California Gold Rush, gave emigrating Brit workers a real alternative.

This is about more than just us

But, for the first time, workers fighting to survive (striking for decent hours, wages and working conditions) were also being told they had an historic obligation to save mankind and get humanity on a direct road to freedom. All of this coming in the Communist Manifesto appearing just as the Revolutions of 1848 began in January.

The reactionaries were able to defeat this labor uprising. Thereafter, and over the following twelve year period, there was relative labor quiescence in Europe. This working class retreat and rearming (after 1852) lasted through the outbreak of the Civil War in North America (1861-1865), until twelve years later, in September of 1864. Then different “labor aristocratic” unions * got together in London to form a defensive organizational bulwark. Defense against what? (1) Against the Brit capitalists use of imported scab labor from the continent and (2) for international strike funds to defend against lockouts.

Labor Aristocracy = the class basis of the first Pie-cards

* Labor aristocrats: About five to ten percent of those then unionized in England were sufficiently well off to be able to pay monthly union dues with some long term prospect of being able to keep this up until a family had been raised. These craft unionists had been the most difficult for radicals to organize. Marx had found a new “defensive” way, of using them as the “mass base” for the new First International. Why these types would be preferable to anyone might be a question today. But, if you saw what he had to deal with in 1864 you could empathize with his desire to begin with this less-than-perfect mass base.

The First Organizational Step

The Second Intervention of Marx

Reawakening in England and the First International

In England, the reawakening of European Labor came in a new and extremely sophisticated form i.e., the (First) International Workingmen’s Association (formed in September 1864 in London). You should note that this is the second intervention of Modern Marxism into the class struggle. (The first being the Communist Manifesto into the Revolutions of 1848). It’s insertion into the international working class movement and its subsequent very skillful handling by Karl Marx tells us a world of things about how we should behave organizationally today. So take the time to read the nine pages of Marx’s Inaugural Address.

Marx became the first of us modern interventionists to prove why we are here. As I have pointed out before we are here precisely because there are many difficult steps and periods along the way from the Servitude Epoch (and its last “capitalist” stage) to the Era of Human Freedom (beginning with the Communist stage.) Since we have the laws of history as our virtual sole property we have a real leg up on the enemy, and in being able to force our program forward step by step.

Furthermore, when you compare and contrast the Manifesto with the Inaugural Address, you can see how much Marx had learned about organizational politics (i.e., the politics of putting together an umbrella organization of truly disparate groups). Compare his language and delicacy in the Inaugural Address to the robust strident revolutionary call to action language of the Manifesto (published 16 years earlier.) By the way, Marx himself comment’s on this rhetorical evolution in his work. So, it is important for you to internalize how Marx had become so sophisticated, and try and learn from his example.

In other words, how and why did Marx’s “politically” careful and correct speech change from one form to another (organizational politics combined with principled politics)? What might this imply for tactical maneuvering in more contemporary settings?

The Second Organizational Step was The Paris Commune (1870 – 1871) we reviewed in the Chapter preceding. This was followed historically by the Third Organization Step (The Russian Councils of 1905)

The Transitional length between Capitalism and Communism

Neither Karl Marx nor Frederick Engels tried to predict how long the transitional Stage of proletarian domination of society’s government’s and state authority would last. What they did agree upon was such a Stage of working class ownership, if you will, of society’s political and “state” (instrument of class oppression - army and police) apparatus would be necessary while the new proletarian class gained ascendance and the old exploiting classes were defeated.

For example Karl Marx wrote:

 “Between capitalist and communist society lies a period of revolutionary transformation from one to the other. There is a corresponding period of transition in the political sphere and in this period the state can only take the form of a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” (Critique of the Gotha Program).

 This Critique was written in 1875 as the German Social Democratic Party was forming and going immediately onto the completely wrong path. However, it was only published 16 years later - eight years after Karl Marx 1883 death.)

In short, Marx and Engels could not be persuaded that the subject of the length of the transition from Capitalism to Communism was a subject even worth discussing. Much the same can be said of V.I. Lenin in Russia when he confronted the issue. All of these intellectual giants knew one thing - it was impossible to predict the future that accurately. There were just too many variables.

What they all did know however, was there would be one or several intermediate Stages before humanity reached that stage of fully free and human society where human power was its own end. That is, power of humans as a species. Not some humans at the expense of other humans. Having said this, I should also point out that among the high-minded altruist intellectuals of the labor movement in Europe and America, there was also the unspoken almost secret assumption that working people would quickly put affairs in order, and go about creating a kind of nirvana or paradise here on Earth, they all believed was quite feasible once contemporary society of dog-eat-dog was done away with. In fact, much the same naiveté exists among many of today’s “would be” revolutionaries.

This was an extremely naive and dangerous assumption. In the early 1900’s, it almost undid everything.

Building within society, because of the underlying mental template of selfishness and sadism that workers were inculcated with to greater or lesser degrees, was the absolute corruption of the labor movement itself; therefore, of the “Labor Party” which sprang from it. In Europe, only the Russians escaped the total perversion of their labor party; that was due to the historically peculiar and particular fact of Vladimir Illych Ulyanov, who we know as V. I. Lenin.

But this corruption of the working class movement did not begin during Lenin’s lifetime. Karl Marx saw the corruption of the labor movement and its Party during his life; he had a plethora of comments to make about it, in letters and in formal papers, as in his 1875 commentary on the wrong path being taken by those calling themselves Marxists in Germany (Critique of the Gotha Program.}

Lenin later took on the bourgeois socialists in the RSDLP (Russian Social Democratic Labor Party) and forced them into a split in 1903. After which his majoritists (Bolsheviks) constituted a de facto separate Party from the traitor minoritists (Mensheviks.) From that point forward the Bolsheviks were the true Labor Party in Russia. The others were bourgeois socialists who formed capitalist parties with a “pitch” to working people.  Such a clear division of those claiming to represent labor happened nowhere else in Europe. Since 1917, true Labor Party leaders have been known world-wide as Bolsheviks. - And, Bolshevism, recognized as the only correct form of scientific Marxism by persons considering themselves communists.

Naiveté

Yet Lenin was also naive. He failed to internalize the complete and total assimilation of the “Labor Party” in the European countries, into the boss hierarchy of the Capitalists over the working class. He believed, as apparently did all the other altruistically inclined naive, that the resolution they had forced through the Second International Congress of 1907 (Stuttgart) actually meant that the now thoroughly corrupted Social Democratic parties would really plan for their member workers to turn their guns against their own governments, when the inevitable imperialist world war broke out. One has to be thoroughly separated from the way real people think to have seriously entertained this concept. Passing a resolution does not alter objective reality.

The Pie-Cards

- And, that reality was the European Social Democratic parties had become the willing handmaidens of European capitalist imperialism. They were led by men whose idea of "socialism" was to have a piece of the capitalist "pie." A pie obtained by stealing from the cheap labor reserves of the Third World. For such leaders a "union card" was to be a "share" in said capitalist pie. Thus, the origin of the term "pie-card" for anti-Communist union leaders around the English-speaking World. Again, the consequences of this naiveté among Bolsheviks, were almost fatal to the birth of the Socialist Stage at that point in time.

Why Did the Capitalists Start the World War in 1914?

Decades of investment overseas - much of which began in the late 1840's - which is to say the shipping of machines and factories (constant capital) to the colonies - produced great profits throughout the decades preceding the world war of 1914. Especially in the twenty years before the outbreak of hostilities. But! The profits that came back in 1913 were so stupendous that ruling capitalists in all the capitalist countries saw that it was time to go to war.

War could do two things for the capitalists of England, France, Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Turkey, Japan and the USA. It could give the victors even better access to that cheap labor-power in what we call the Third World and those colonial markets they might capture. That was the best case; in the worst case, the losers would lose a few colonies; and the capitalists felt it was a risk they were willing to take; losses could be negotiated to a minimum.

- And, there was no downside! No matter what the military outcome. Each capitalist class would have liquidated millions of its most troublesome male workers.

These European workers were the single greatest threat the capitalists faced. To Capital they were the enemy within. As Karl Marx predicted, massive armies of unemployed existed throughout Europe. - And, the Marxists had radicalized these workers by educating them as to the nature of the Capitalist system. By 1913 these workers, more often than not, were no longer needed as cheap labor-power because the capitalists had seized Africa, Asia and Latin America and had their dirt-cheap labor at their disposal. Even though their leaders were corrupt, and a de facto part of the Capitalist classes ruling hierarchical machines, no one could tell when this boss hierarchy of “social democrats” might be pushed aside, by the rising tide of working class militancy - or, that their bosses, the Social Democratic union pie-cards might not decide to take power anyway, as they would be the class administering the factories supposedly under “public” ownership.

No. Take no chances. Kill as many male workers as possible. - And, then if some domestic additional labor-power should be needed you could put their women and children into the factories. They were by far the best workers anyway because they were easier to control. Well over a century of experience had proven that. It was women and children who were first brought into machinofacture production. - And, the history of this tradition goes way back into the Feudal Stage.

Under Feudal conditions, in China and in Europe, women and children producing yarns and pottery pre-forms had made all the difference between starvation and survival from year to year for the serf household. Why? Because the men were worked so hard by and for their masters, there was nothing left for their families.

It now seems inconceivable to me that anyone could have thought that anything other than what did happen on the 4th of August, 1914, would have happened! Yet it caught Lenin totally by surprise when the German Social Democrats voted the war funds for the Kaiser’s Capitalist Regime and the war was off and running! - And, then, the other traitor parties of Social Democrats did the same thing in England, France, Italy, etc., ad nauseum.

Vladimir Illych Ulyanov: the Czar’s Greatest Mistake

A brilliant Russian student, Alexander Ulyanov, tried to do something to help his country. Consequently, he was hung in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg by the last of the Russian Czars. This was Czar Nicholas’s greatest mistake.

Why?

The Czar would pay with his life! - And the lives of his wife and his children too! Because Alexander’s brother, named Vladimir Illych Ulyanov, would see to it that he, and they, died under bullet fire in 1918.

But there was far more to it than just revenge. What was this all about?

Vladimir Illych Ulyanov, later to be known as Vladimir Illych Lenin, led the Party that overthrew the Czar’s evil regime and created the first worker’s government in the world.

Vladimir turned his attention from the normal pursuits of a bright young boy in High School to revenge, when his brother was murdered. – And, as the whole world knows, he was more than successful. Lenin did far more than avenge his brother. Lenin avenged the entire working class of the world against their common enemy.

Born in 1870, Lenin, or V. I. Ulyanov, was the son of a relatively prosperous petty bourgeois family (his father an educator and a Czarist bureaucrat; his mother was fully bourgeois and a large landowner.) Perhaps no one could, or should, have expected this young person to be more than his parents. Yet, history has a way of determining what each person might or must be. In this case, history created one of its greatest actors.

Alexander Ulyanov was a budding biologist when arrested by the Okhrana (the Czarist secret police) and typically passive politically. At least, until, and because of the Czar’s incredibly inhuman oppression of farmers in Simbirsk, where he lived, he tried to help by removing the Czar. Accused of attempting to assassinate the Czar, something discussed amongst Alexander and his “comrades”, he was informed upon, and arrested. Alexander’s family was not without influence in St. Petersburg (later named Petrograd by the Czar and still later named Leningrad by the victors in the coming civil war) but without his father (now deceased) his mother’s and his family’s influence was insufficient to send the boy into exile. He was hung.

Changed

 Vladimir began studying Karl Marx the summer following his brother’s hanging. He spent that summer with an uncle and used the time to read Capital Volume One and that made him decide to pursue the same course as his brother but to do it scientifically. Meaning to organize and utilize the growing mass of proletarians in Russia’s major cities. Marx had proven it was only the working class that could do the job because only they had no class choice.

No longer the happy-go-lucky, go-along-to-get-along, slap-on-the-back, fellow-well-met, type of High School student he had been before Alexander’s hanging, Lenin now became, according to Nadazhda Krupskaya (his wife to come), somewhat morose and introspective. Vladimir remained very close to his mother and his sisters over the coming years but to all of them he had “changed.” Vladimir was now a very “serious” young man.

“Serious” has always seemed a serious understatement to me. I think even a perfunctory review of Lenin’s life leads us to conclude that Lenin never had a thought in his mind other than the overthrow of the Czarist regime and equally in importance in his mind the substitution of human control over our own destiny, after his brother’s hanging.

Together Forever

The most important thing in life is “to try” in my humble opinion. This is as true in revolutionary politics as in any other aspect of life. Lenin saw it that way. He gave up what would have been an extremely lucrative law practice specializing in working class law (contract law for employees; workmen’s compensation, etc.) to organize Social Democratic (revolutionary) workers circles and was rewarded accordingly with imprisonment by the Okhrana and exile to Siberia.

Along the way he met a beautiful young intellectual woman, Nadazhda Krupskaya, and after his arrest and exile to Minusinsk, Siberia, she also was arrested. For whatever reason she had the presence of mind to tell the police the total lie that she was Vladimir Ulyanov’s wife! However, that may have been in her mind, it is certainly true that Lenin thought of her that way after their coming three years in joint exile, and he became her husband. The proof being that Krupskaya’s gambit ended up in making the two of them husband and wife for the rest of their lives.

As an aside, I have only known two people personally, that knew each of them, and in each case I have been told that Nadashda Krupskaya was not only a brilliant person personally, but an extraordinarily sensitive and loving person. For me the idea of her brilliance is obvious. Why else would she and Lenin have been together all of their lives.

- And, the assertion she was especially loving toward the poor and defenseless I believe to be a correct assessment. Not just because of the role she played politically over the coming years but because of the fact, before she met Lenin, she was dedicated to trying to help poor farmers learn how to read and write. In fact it was in this early embryonic period she met Lenin. He convinced her that the problems of the poor and ignorant could not be resolved by bourgeois charity but instead the entire system had to be changed.

Comrade Krupskaya wrote a biography of Lenin and as the years progressed she granted many interviews with the Soviet and foreign press that were specifically directed at learning more about Lenin the Man. The thing that stuck in my mind the most from the very beginning of my reading was how Alexander’s hanging changed Lenin’s life.

Inside Snapshot

Condensed from multiple Sources

Nadeshda Krupskaya

“…we spent a long time together alone in Siberia and during those years I came to see how an atrocious act can influence other unrelated persons. Lenin told me ‘he was responsible for Alexander’s death because he was so involved with his athletic endeavors and sports events that he had ignored his brother and therefore knew nothing about his involvement with those who would change Russia by assassinating the Czar.’ He said many times that this was because of the nature of our society, being focused as it was on bettering oneself, making money, getting ahead. I told him again and again when this subject came up ‘Illych (Lenin was called Illych by his family and friends rather than Vladimir) you are not responsible for what your older brother did about which you knew nothing.’ He said with absolute certainty, and those of us who knew Illych know when he made up his mind that was it, that he was responsible even if by ignorance and inattention. He called it third degree murder. You know his legal training.

“– And, he would not allow me to pursue this too far. His point always was that the whole thing was just stupid. He said ‘even if they had succeeded what difference would it have made? There would have just been a new Czar! I don’t know why Alexander couldn’t see that. It was so obvious. If you want to get rid of Czarism you have to overthrow the system, not a man!’

“Then one day he said, ‘Krupskaya I don’t ever want to discuss this again. I have chosen my side. Either they will kill me or by God I will destroy not only this bastard the Czar but his entire system, and liquidate the entire class of capitalist bloodsuckers behind him’

“That was the last time we ever spoke about Alexander. I was young and in love and somewhat insecure in that we were only recently married and I did not want to presume any more than I already had in telling the Okhrana the lies that got me shipped to Minusinsk originally. The truth is that I don’t think Illych even remembered me when I showed up on his doorstep. I immediately confessed to him what I had done and to my everlasting gratitude he acted as if I had done exactly the right thing and invited me in to his home.” (A more recent biography of Lenin tells the story less romantically, having Nadya and her mother showing up on Lenin’s Siberian doorstep expected and with the order from the Okrahana that they be married immediately or she would be moved on.)

I have seen photos of Krupskaya as a young woman at the time she met Lenin and I think she underestimates the impact she would have had on any heterosexual man. She was indeed strikingly beautiful and I doubt very much that Lenin would have forgotten their having met in Social Democratic secret settings. However that may have been the two were together, forever, thereafter.

Jailed

    After Alexander’s execution Lenin became a lawyer. He specialized in representing workers in the fine laws. In fact that is the name of his first publication. This refers to the law in Russia at the time which allowed workers to be fined monetarily for errors made in the workplace or tools damaged in the performance of their duties. Obviously this was a gimmick to justify cutting a worker’s paycheck. Yet, the authors of the fine laws had placed certain provisions in these laws which allowed workers to contest the fines. That was just what Lenin as an attorney needed if he were to bring a worker’s case in front of the Czarist courts.

     Lenin gathered a following in St. Petersburg because of his success as a personal injury, workmen’s compensation, lawyer representing workers. Even when not successful in Czarist courts he gained a great deal of admiration from working people.

    Not satisfied with these endeavors he immediately began to secretly educate his clients and their friends. He used his position and his contacts to gather the raw data to prove that in sociocultural evolutionary terms Russia was a capitalist country albeit primitive and terribly distorted by Czarist feudalism. This data gathering was the first phase in the creation of his initial magnum opus: The Development of Capitalism in Russia.

Ulyanov Becomes Lenin

The Russian Social Democrats were just wannabe carbon copies of the German Social Democrats at this time, but they were the only worker’s party (other than the crackpot anarchists) in Russia. The few Social Democrats who existed in Russia formed their version of German Social Democracy in 1898 calling themselves the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. As one of those openly proclaiming in favor of a revolutionary Social Democratic course of action, Lenin was arrested in St. Petersburg just before Christmas 1895 and spent 14 month in the prison “hole” (solitary) and was then (February 1897) sent to Siberia (first he traveled to Krasnoyarsk town, Minusinsk district, and finally 36 miles by river downstream to the town of Shushenskoe, also in the Minusinsk district) for an extended sentence of three more years. He wrote his first theoretical book The Development of Capitalism in Russia in large part while in that St. Petersburg prison. He finished it in Siberia and sent it to the St. Petersburg printer who published it in 1899 – the exigencies of everyone’s situation meant that it appeared initially under a pen name – Vladimir Ilyin - but everyone in and around the Social Democratic movement in Russia and Western Europe knew the real author to be Vladimir Ulyanov. As were the Czarist secret police. Ilyin would shortly be changed to Lenin.

The Czarist secret police (the Okhrana) were well aware that Lenin was the brother of the revolutionary Alexander Ulyanov, who had been executed in the Shisselburg Fortress. That Fortress being the most secure Czarist prison located on an island on Lake Ladoga some 35 miles from the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg where Alexander had been held for two months prior to his May 5, 1887, execution at Shisselburg. As for his brother, Vladimir Ulyanov, the Okhrana had been keeping a close eye on him after his brother’s hanging and before his arrest 8 years later in December, 1895 (he had made his first trip to West Europe just prior to being picked up on his return.) Perhaps some of the cops were even sympathetic with Vladimir because of what had happened to his brother. After all they could have killed Lenin in his jail cell had they had anything truly personal against him. Obviously they didn’t.

Siberia

Different people reacted to prison and exile to Siberia in different ways. Lenin was a rather normal political prisoner as far as the Okhrana was concerned and they soon forgot about him. Most young bourgeois intellectuals learned from this experience and would return to society as reformed and rehabilitated young people bent on achieving success in business or academia or some such thing. Some would be slow learners and return several times before they too saw the light. Overall it was a system that had worked extremely well for Czarism. Curing the stupid while they were still young enough to understand that “resistance is futile”. Far better than alienating their families and friends forever as would otherwise most likely occur, if they were hung. These were young men and women whose families and/or friends were important.

Unfortunately for the Czar the exile system had not been universally applied as the case of Alexander Ulyanov testified – its failure in this one case would insure Nicolas a premature death.

Lenin’s Plan

Lenin spent his time in exile planning to overthrow the entire Czarist system. If there was anyone the Okhrana should have murdered it was this young Russian lawyer in Siberia. But the Okhrana didn’t know what was going on in Lenin’s mind, and even if he had told them they would have laughed. How could a newspaper endanger their system?

Lenin knew he had to get out of Russia as soon as possible and as soon as his prison term expired and he was released he left the country quickly. So quickly that he had to leave his new wife behind, for her prison term still had time to run.

Lenin had a plan. That plan was to go to Zurich, Switzerland, and to start a revolutionary newspaper which would be smuggled into Russia so the most militant workers would be in direct touch with the revolutionary intellectual vanguard leadership safely abroad. In his mind he had already named this newspaper Iskra (the Spark). Why Zurich? Because in 1899 Switzerland was where the majority of Russia’s Marxists were living. Some had been there for decades. Others were recent arrivals and had taken the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party leadership function to Zurich, the previous year (1898) after its initial formation and while Lenin was in Siberia. They did need to flee as the Okhrana had infiltrated their ranks from the beginning and knew more about them than they knew!

Lenin knew he had to have money and had spent his time in exile working with Victor Kurnatovsky and through him indirectly with his coming closest associate Leonid Krassin. These three agreed on just about everything and two of them (Lenin and Krassin) would constitute (along with always a third person who varied through time) what was sometimes referred to in those days as the Bolshevik Holy Trinity! These two stuck together through the success of the Bolshevik Revolution and the initial years of the Soviet Republic. From Siberia forward Lenin and Krassin (always with a third person) worked to identify funds that should belong to the people and expropriate them (rob banks, stagecoaches and ships, in other words.) About this the intellectuals in Switzerland did not need to know. Lenin felt since his family had money that should be a sufficient explanation for his financial situation as of the moment.

Lenin’s Payroll: Here is how it worked

While on the run, in the few months he had before the Okhrana (Czarist secret police) picked him up in St. Petersburg, in December, 1895, Lenin noted several things that could be done right now to negate the success of these cops. Social democratic workers were being picked up because they had no money, no safe-houses, no prearranged escape routes, and no safe medical doctors, not to mention any armorers and munitions procurers. (By synchronous comparison, Gringo bank robbers like John Dillinger - see the movie Public Enemies – took these services for granted until Meyer Lansky made a deal with Jane Edgar Hoover to withdraw this support. As I have explained elsewhere this was because Meyer sent Frank Costello to Jane Edgar every week-end from the 1930’s through the 1950’s to sodomize the FBI chief during their weekend love sessions.  For details see my book The Buccaneer.)  

  All of these were new things to Russian Social Democrat intellectuals in 1895, and they had been unprepared. As individuals they usually had money but it was at home and they couldn’t go home to get it or they would be arrested. They had homes but all were known to the Okhrana. What Lenin realized was he needed a combat Party with its own internal structure to handle its own needs which meant its own funding – its own payroll.

In exile for three years at Minusinsk, Siberia, Lenin and Krupskaya met Victor Kurnatovsky. Kurnatovsky was well connected to both revolutionaries and the financial industry in the Caucuses. In short, he convinced Lenin they could fund their operations via bank, steamship and stagecoach robberies and perhaps some other targets of opportunity. With the cash thus recovered they could pay their cadre (even communists have to eat, pay rent, doctors and armorers, and support families) regardless of whether the police were looking for them. Lenin wanted a Party where its cadre could hide in unknown Party safe-houses; care for wounded or sick cadre and rearm. Not to mention that the Party could then move its cadre along established escape and/or infiltration routes. They could also properly arm and rearm them as needed.

 In the case of the West of the Empire these escape and/or infiltration routes would be the same as the petroleum products distribution network, along with the rest of the Black Market flood, which had always come north from Batum and Baku.

 Lenin was released along with Kurnatovsky in 1900. The former headed for Switzerland and the latter for Baku. Waiting behind was Krupskaya whose term had several months to run and this would be an excellent excuse to keep her in place and guide two more soon-to-be released Social Democrat prisoners to the Caucuses after which she would depart for Zurich herself.

In Baku, Kurnatovsky linked up with Leonid Krassin. Krassin was a capitalist, a New Class type of bureaucrat (eventually to be known as oil technocrat). Most importantly he was a Social Democrat of the direct action Lenin type. Krassin began recruiting the young men Kurnatovsky was going to need to get the robbing underway. One of these was a fourteen year old lad named Joseph Dzugashvili who went by the name of the Georgian heroic Robin Hood figure “Koba.” Soon Koba would be the head of Lenin’s expropriation teams and Krassin would be moved up the ladder in the Czar’s War Procurement Ministry. Within a dozen years Koba would be a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee known as Joseph V. Stalin.

By the time the Bolsheviks organization emerged in Russia (permanently divided from the revisionist (Menshevik) traitors of the Social Democratic milieu of nonsense in Zurich) as an independent Party, it had its own Treasury in Russia. This treasury would be full one way or another, permanently, from thence forward. Let us look at one example of how the payroll worked once funds were obtained.

Eventual leading Bolshevik, Nikolai Krylenko, was a typical example. He joined the Bolshevik Party at its inception in 1904 at St. PetersburgUniversity and during the following year’s abortive Revolution he served on the leadership bodies of the St. Petersburg City Council, and the Bolshevik St. Petersburg City Committee. As soon as he was recruited in 1904 he had been on Lenin’s payroll so that by the time he was elevated to a working Party cadre position, as he had been in St. Petersburg in 1905, he stayed on Lenin’s Payroll and would have stayed there until the collapse of the 1905 Revolution and the subsequent disarray, as Party cashiers ran for the border along with everyone else.

Over the next four years Krylenko bounced back and forth between the Empire and other European locales and operated on funds supplied to him by Lenin on an irregular basis. From these he paid his expenses and those of others he was charged with supporting inside the Empire. In the subsequent seven years Krylenko followed this latter pattern of reimbursement, because it was what was required by the exigencies of illegal operation both in the civil life of Czarist Russia and in the Czarist Army where he had ended up when the February Revolution broke out in 1917.

Follow the Money

Now the question arises as to how did Lenin get enough money together to buy three ships and fill them with the most effective modern armament? We have seen that the Bolsheviks had conducted bank robberies and the most dramatic cited raised a quarter of a million gold rubles for Lenin. But anyone can see by researching ship and armament prices of the time (1905) that just this one interrupted shipment would have cost much more than what was recovered by the Bolsheviks in that one expropriation. (There had been a shipping accident that sunk one ship and derailed the two others and much of the armament was seized by the Okhrana and the Army.) Even considering that the maritime seamen and the trainers they carried with all that equipment were Social Democrats volunteers, many Bolsheviks among them, just the labor subsistence and medical costs on such a journey would have been immense.

The answer is that the Bolshevik fund raising program involved thousands of bank robberies in this time period (1900 to 1905) accompanied by nearly as many armed robberies (stage coaches and ships, included). At this critical juncture it was not a Party Theoretician Lenin elevated to the Holy Trinity but first the bank robber in chief, Leonid Krassin. Remember Lenin had worked indirectly or directly with Krassin for the past seven years. Since their collaboration had a two year introductory period (via Victor Kurnatovsky initially who was in Minusinsk with Lenin with Krassin waiting in the Caucuses.) – And five years of direct relations by courier. In 1905 when Lenin moved his HQ to the Finnish Russian border area it was Krassin he brought with him (and a longtime Bolshevik ally, Bogdanov.)

Enter the Chief Armaments Buyer for Ecuador’s Military Junta

Colonel Maxim Litvinov

Armed with many millions of Russian gold rubles converted into US dollars, Swiss Francs, French Franks, British Pounds and so forth in several highly respected Parisian banks Vice Bank Robber in Chief, the Bolshevik, Maxim Litvinov (born Meyer Wallach of Jewish parents in Poland), along with a small group of compatriots from the Caucuses began buying military equipment from European arms manufacturers in a variety of countries. Litvinov  was able to get the Japanese to provide their best modern machine guns at reasonable prices. (Remember the trigger for the now raging revolution in Russia had been the Russo-Japanese war and Japan still looked toward getting more out of her victory than she had already achieved. Leave it to Litvinov to find a way to explain that to them with material consequences.)

Litvinov and his principle associate in this endeavor (a comrade who went by the underground name of Kamo and who arranged the Balkan sources of weapons and volunteer fighters) got repeating rifles from Switzerland, Brownings and Mausers from Hamburg licensees, and in the UK alone bought 15,500 rifles, 250,000 cartridges, 2,500 revolvers, 3 tons of high explosives, loading all this from Japanese sources and arms manufacturers in western Europe and the UK, Litvinov then had it loaded for an ill-fated trip to Petersburg via the Finnish coast (we have already mentioned.)

Romanian police found a wrecked yacht where they recovered 2000 rifles and 650,000 bullets. (Krassin said “…it was a lot more than that, including cash, but they obviously stole that and sold the other weapons.”)

This shows us that Lenin, Krassin, Kamo ( and Stalin) had reactivated the Black Sea-Caspian petroleum products route to Moscow, St. Petersburg (and every other major Russian city) once again. This means the Holy Trinity was supplying their armed insurrectionary teams in Petersburg, Moscow, and wherever else, from the south as well as from the Finnish coastal northern route. ( Three hundred, 5 to 7 man, armed insurrectionary teams were ordered, by Lenin, to be created in January of 1905 for Petersburg alone. Now many more were being assembled, and armed, for an uprising then currently scheduled for the spring of 1906. The exact timing and the date was Lenin’s decision to make, and he opted for the revolution to be in process, to be in place, perhaps on the verge of consolidating state power, for the returning soldiery and sailors who were known to be extremely angry with the Government over its war time incompetence against Japan.)

However, several more identical shipments did get through and the Bosses (Lenin and Krassin) sitting in Finland and/or Petersburg said “…not to worry about it we have plenty more on the high seas.”  Many gold rubles indeed must have occupied the Bolshevik treasury by 1905.

Litvinov presented himself as a Colonel from the Republic of Ecuador which was deeply involved in civil war with more than two contestants for state power, all fielding military forces, South American style. He visited the armaments manufacturers all over Europe to get his list of equipment for Lenin. The Boss was planning on triggering an armed seizure of state power to begin in the spring of next year (spring of 1906.) He provided the end user statements where necessary and had shipment taken to appropriate port for trans-oceanic journeys. In this case the ocean would be to the east and not west, for these ships and their cargo were on their way to St. Petersburg and Moscow- not Quito nor Guayaquil

At one Arms convention “Colonel” Litvinov stood shoulder to shoulder with the Russian Czar’s top generals also their as potential buyers and of course of representatives of the Russian market. One might assume they would be surprised to know that Colonel Litvinov was actually buying the same arms to takes to their current most deadly enemy – for the revolution and the counterrevolution were raging at home all over the Empire.

Back at the Ranch

Krylenko along with others in the Krassin team learned how to rob in one country (the Czarist Empire) live in another (Switzerland) and bank in still another (France, England, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Spain, etc.) Learning how to deposit and withdraw in circumspect ways and how to work with individual bankers to get what you wanted quietly was a critical Bolshevik “secret department” way of “institutionalizing” Bolshevik financial policy. Gold dealers in Europe would melt down Czarist bricks and other identifiable gold items and pay up to 75% (usually only 50%) in immediately exchangeable currency. But, it was a treacherous profession full of shylocks and killers and required sophistication to handle. That is how the banking and gold exchange arm of the Bolshevik Treasury had to work.

During the six months from February to October of 1917, Krylenko was one of the major recipients of Lenin’s money (much of it now recently obtained from the German General Staff). When the Bolsheviks succeeded in the seizure of Russian state power, 24-26 October, 1917, Krylenko would have switched from the Party payroll to the Government payroll and that was permanent, as it was with all of the surviving Old Bolsheviks.

Without these independent financial resources the Bolsheviks would never have been able to get off the ground. They would have remained part of the sewing circle of intellectuals in Europe, isolated from their own people, and indeed from reality.

The Source of our Error lay in our deficient Understanding of Sociocultural Stage Psychology

(Mental Template Imprinting)

Having completely misunderstood the absorption of the German Social Democrats into the boss hierarchy of the German Capitalists Lenin was stunned and shaken. He went to the Bern (Switzerland) library in September of 1914.

Why?

Because he was going back to Hegel. He spent a year trying to figure out what had gone wrong. The fact that he had to do it this way, shows how isolated he was from the reality of everyday people; the way they think. Which is rather amazing, given his many years of underground organizing and clandestine operations, not to mention his jail time and exile to Siberia for three years.

This is more than an interesting sideline to our story. It is the very essence of it. Because as you are going to see, if you haven’t already, it is the idea that people, especially poor and working people, are ideologically pure of heart, essentially good, birthed with a blank slate, etc. which turns out to be fundamentally wrong. People are whatever the environmental template of society is – culture being the environment – and when it is altruistic people are altruistic and when it is selfish-sadistic people are selfish-sadistic. Furthermore, and finally, the template is set by the Epoch and the Stage and is inculcated into nearly everyone regardless of class. It would take many decades to figure this out. Now, back to our story.

Herein Lies the First Importance of Joseph Stalin

Did Joseph Stalin suffer from this kind of extreme naiveté?

There were not many naive bones in Stalin’s body. Stalin came from the most oppressed sector of Georgia’s working class would-be small-bourgeois population. He suffered an alcoholic father that beat him senseless, and left him with a crippled arm and a religious washer woman for a mother. His first sexual experience was with a religious and uneducated Georgian girl. A young woman who he nevertheless was deeply in love with; her death by poverty scarred him psychologically for the rest of his life.

At any rate Stalin had gone to prison seven times and escaped six times when the First World War broke out in August of 1914. I suspect Stalin wasn’t surprised that all the traitor parties were traitor parties. What else could you expect from a labor movement that had been co-opted into the boss hierarchy of the capitalist classes? Nothing else.

Now the workers would have to pay the price of having been betrayed. For, re-division of world markets and cheap labor-power (in the colonies) was only one objective of the world war the capitalists had launched. The other was the equally important objective of killing as many million supernumeraries, unwanted, and dangerously restive socialistic/communistic European working class males as possible! Lenin understood this and so did his principal Bolshevik followers. Of all of them, it was Joseph Stalin, a direct victim of all the evils of his time, who perhaps more than any other, understood in his very soul the truths of Marx’s and now Lenin’s understanding.

This is what the US ruling bosses have in mind for you, by the way. Their plan is to kill you off in huge (genocidal) numbers, at home and abroad. You are no longer necessary to them. They have begun by building prisons for you, using the phony “war on drugs” as the excuse; engaging in wars planned to kill you; creating new diseases to exterminate you; and exploiting environmental catastrophes of geologic proportions to finish off the job. (The Katrina hurricane and the BP oil spill are local examples) - And, in this latter regard, have had the insulting audacity to put on a Hope-Crosby type of “road movie” to dull your perception as in the aftermath of the Indonesian Tsunami (as in “the Traveling Clinton-Bush” road show.) Clinton and gang show up in Haiti and a year later millions still live in tents in a cess pool.

Stalin’s first importance to Lenin and the Bolsheviks was precisely because he was clear on the nature of the enemy and what was to be done about them AND he was willing to get those things done for his Party and his Chief. – And, this clarity was achieved first of all in the real school of life. Lenin recognized these qualities in Stalin, calling him “that wonderful Georgian.”

Stalin’s Special Relationship with Lenin

One might wonder why the question of Stalin and Stalinism has been so terribly distorted in the English-speaking world. The answer should be obvious. The ruling capitalist classes, and their academic toadies, desperately needed to attack Stalin and they found the most convenient way of attacking him to utilize the mythology spread by Trotsky about him. A mythology dragged into the 21st century by FBI agents like the low-life scumbag traitor Sam Webb. -

And the capitalists very well paid hacks like Robert Conrad and Robert Payne.

The Lies

Lying about history is the stock and trade of capitalist academics, and especially when it comes to the history of socialism, and this continues to this very day. For example, in May of 2009 PBS broadcast the most recent attack of the few remaining Gringolandia fascist academics against Stalin: World War II: Stalin the Nazi’s and the West. It starts out with a great lie of omission (ignoring the twenty two year history of Britain and France against the USSR including their every attempt at sending Hitler against the USSR during the years 1933–1941, which you will learn all about below in chapter 16 on World War II) and the PBS lies continue, one compounded on the other, throughout this miserable series.

This mini-series features the execution of several thousand Polish enemies of the people (and these were the worst people who ever lived in Poland) at Stalin’s orders. I certainly would have done the same thing if I had been in Stalin’s place, and I would expect so would any other true working class leader. However that may be, these remaining fascist screenwriters proceed in their so-called “documentary” movie to claim the liquidation of the kulaks was a mass murder. In fact from our standpoint removing the kulaks from the countryside (chapter 15 below) was one of the best things Stalin ever did. For liquidating this backbone class of capitalism in Russian agriculture Stalin received and is receiving, and will receive, countless kudos and our everlasting thanks for many generations yet to come. See what you think after reading chapter fifteen. Finally it is unclear to me how many kulaks actually perished out of the number relocated to Siberia or sent to prison work camps, not that the number is the key criteria. But it is always useful to know the facts being discussed.

Hopefully no one of you will ever give a penny to PBS, as I have mistakenly done in the past. (PBS is worse than FOX when it becomes the purveyor of historical lies and mythology, because everyone knows what FOX is.) Yet even worse is the attack ongoing in the USA by Left fakirs like FBI agent Sam Webb, who says “what about Stalin’s crimes?” In fact, this PBS pack of lies was rushed out to counter the truth as now is being published herein and in other books. Especially since the earlier excellent movie World War II: When Lions Roared with major actors (Michael Caine, Bob Hoskins, John Lithgow) playing the roles of Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt has had such an impact on contemporary thinking in Gringo academia of a positive (which is to say truthful) way; meaning a truthful exposition of World War II and its conduct as reflected in the memoirs of these three participants. PBS is after all, just another capitalist outlet for lies and misstatements of history, albeit unlike FOX (Fascist Oxymoron) it is aimed at “educated” North Americans as opposed to the lumpen and ignorant misled sheep targeted by the latter. Unfortunately, on world standards, what passes for political and historical education in Gringolandia is a travesty of lies and childish comic book propaganda, sometimes backed up by silly religious fairytales of the Bible School variety.

FBI Caught with its hands in the Till: the Sam Webb story

As a matter of interest the gringo government’s CPUSA cover document, the FBI pamphlet (authored by FBI Special Agent Sam Webb) “Reflections on Socialism”, was rushed out precisely to counter this book, in its original edition – five years ago. The FBI is panic stricken over the exposure of their puppet Party under Sam Webb as they have spent so many millions over many years to create this entity for which they had high hopes. Now it is exposed and going down the sewer of history where it belongs.

From Trotsky to Khrushchev

The international communist movement had already handled the lies spread by Trotsky so there would have to be a new set of lies and myths from a reputable source to do the job against Stalin and the imperialists did not have long to wait. Within three years of Stalin’s death, they had a new arsenal of lies to use against the memory of the man who had made Socialism triumphant across the surface of the Earth. This coming in the form of a new mythology created by Stalin’s one-time right-hand man, Nikita Khrushchev, in his so-called secret report to the Party Congress in 1956. That nonsense put the icing on the anti-Stalin cake being cooked up by imperialism in conjunction with modern revisionism.

The New Class in Russia, with Nikita Khrushchev at its head, was asserting itself for political domination of the USSR and to do that they had to discredit Stalin. All of this Khrushchev crap was and is aimed at vindicating the fairy-tale novelistic history written by New York Times hack Robert Payne (in his biography Stalin) based on nothing but his own creative imagination working on Trotsky’s earlier published slanders. In turn HBO took on the task of justifying Payne’s fairy-tale history by inserting the voice-over of an actress speaking words from Stalin’s daughter as if she had been there for all of this. In the process the movie producers for HBO confused her book with Payne’s so the viewer never gets a true read on what she said. – And, so there the matter stood.

Learning the Truth, Little by Little

As the years since 1965 progressed and I read more and more of the original documents I came to see an entirely different Stalin than the one Trotsky propagandized and Khrushchev invented. So different that it is truly shocking.

Furthermore, because of my own involvement in the intelligence service I began to see how Stalin organized and led the most important combat part of the international communist movement – the Red Secret Service – and, accordingly, I have been writing a book about it (Red Sword, Red Shield). Let me give you an accurate assessment of Stalin’s originating role in the Bolshevik Party.

Stalin was born Joseph Vissarionovich Dzugashvili on December 9, 1879 in Gori, Georgia. (Roughly ten years younger than Lenin.) Nicknamed Soso by others, he chose the name “Koba” for himself by the time of his adolescence. In time he would take on a new name. His official new name would be Stalin, the man of steel. But that was some time into the future (c. 1911). For now Stalin would be Joseph, Soso, or Koba.

Koba was the hero of a Robin Hood novel about a Georgian who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. Joseph continued to use Koba as his Party name in the underground world of the RSDLP. The main book Koba read was The Patricide, its author Alexander Kazbegi – perhaps the wealthiest landowner in Georgia - had released his serfs from their serf obligations, given away his own wealth, and gone to living as a simple herder of sheep in the mountains of Georgia. Writing his Koba stories occupied Kazbegi’s plentiful spare time as a shepherd during the years 1880 to 1886. The first six years of Joseph’s childhood.

At the age of 8 (1887) Joseph’s mother enrolled him in elementary school. Here he was forced to learn Russian, as instruction was done only in Russian, and he completed elementary and middle schooling therefore in the Russian language. He graduated with honors from this church school in 1894 and at the age of 14 (1893) was admitted to the seminary in Tiflis (Tbilisi), Georgia, for high schooling, which was the only way toward a higher education for a poor boy. The following year, still at the age of 14 (1894), he joined the Russian Social Democratic circle (called Mesame Dasi) in Tiflis (renamed Tbilisi in 1936 by him.) There, in 1894, Koba caught the attention of the man who would become his mentor, Leonid Krassin.

Krassin was a well-educated capitalist, working for Russian wildcatters and foreign oil concerns as a manager, “company man” (the US term for the financier’s boss of the drilling site), and sometimes as an entrepreneur for himself, wildcatting in the rough- And-tumble oilfield culture of Georgia, especially around Caspian Sea Baku and Black Sea Batum. During the last three years of the nineteenth century Krassin kept in closest touch as possible with his associate Victor Kurnatovsky who had been exiled to Minusinsk, Siberia where he had established close working relations with V. I. Ulyanov. (Who had, for example, become a Social Democratic leading light as he had published The Development of Capitalism in Russia in St. Petersburg in 1899 even though he was still very much in exile in Minusinsk. History was moving fast – in fact, even faster than these revolutionary optimists believed – The Revolution beginning in January 1905 was only five years away.)

Krassin was also a secret organizer for what would soon be (1898) the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. (Krassin would become a member of the Bolshevik Holy Trinity along with Lenin, and become, as Lenin laughingly joked many years later, the “finance minister of the Bolshevik Revolution.” Krassin was always Lenin’s main right hand and closest advisor and colleague.)

Koba’s World

The US Civil War led to the most rapid transformation of an economy of primitive capitalist accumulation into one of massive capitalist accumulation the world had ever seen. Among the most important commodities the US capitalists were supplying to Europe were petroleum products. Among these in 1875, the production of kerosene accounted for half of the volume of the US production of oil, and kerosene export constituted 25% of US total export value. Most of this export went to Europe. It was inevitable that European capitalists would recognize the profit to be had in seizing part if not all of this oil market. The family leading the assault on the American (Rockefeller family) monopoly was named Nobel. (Later of Nobel Prize fame.)

At the turn of the century three families dominated the Russian oil industry: the Nobel’s, the Rockefellers and the Rothschild’s. This world Koba encountered as a teen-ager was about to be changed: by him.

The Nobel’s in Russia

On the periphery of Europe, both in terms of sociocultural stage evolution and geography, was the Russian Empire. Industrialization began to get underway in the Russia’s with a vengeance at the same time as massive capital accumulation was occurring in the Americas. In 1862, St. Petersburg, capital of the Russian Empire, witnessed a new kind of miracle. Arriving American kerosene allowed the capital to be lit at night, all night, cleanly and safely. When the night lasts nearly all day for six months of the year, this was not a minor development.

(Note also the American government in Washington was so well supplied with petroleum fuel from Pennsylvania, even in the first year of the US Civil War (1861-62) which had gone so badly for it, it could maintain the continuous export of hard-currency-earning kerosene to Europe. The Slavocrat Regime in Richmond meanwhile found itself cut off altogether from outside trade by the US blockade of Southern ports. The hand-writing was on the wall for a Marxist observer – the fuel-starved South could not win a GNP industrial war as North America was then currently constructed. Thus, its defeat was assured and only a matter of time.)

Back in the Empire, at the head of this adventure in lighting, living in the Imperial capital of St. Petersburg, was the chemist Robert Nobel, son of Swedish originating, Russian military-industrial inventor, Immanuel Nobel. Immanuel’s company collapsed and another son, Ludwig, took over trying to salvage the remnants of his father’s failed military-industrial complex. Critical to Ludwig’s success was the invention of dynamite by still another son of Immanuel, Ludwig’s brother Albert. Ludwig dispatched his brother Robert to the Caucuses to come up with the wood for the rifle stocks for the rifles he now would produce under contract for the Czarist Army.

When Robert arrived in Baku, in the spring of 1873, it was, as I say, to purchase wood for Ludwig’s rapidly growing armaments factories where rifle stocks for new Czarist Army contracts were needed. However, what Robert grasped upon arrival was an entirely new way of producing the commodity of oil. Robert immediately grasped two things about the oil boom at Baku. One was that kerosene could be made cheaply here if one had a refinery. The second was that he finally could get a second chance. Things had not gone well for Robert in life and this oil situation was one where he saw an opportunity to amount to something more than a black sheep in the family. He took the 25,000 rubles his brother had entrusted to him for walnut wood and instead invested in a small refinery.

At first it seemed that Robert had turned into another “Jack” as in the Beanstalk fable. Fortunately for him, he would turn out to be right on both counts.

Three years later, in 1876, the first shipment of Robert’s Nobel Kerosene arrived in St. Petersburg. The Imperial viceroy for the Caucuses was the Czar’s brother, a friend and business partner of Robert’s brother Ludwig (the brother with the rifle contracts in St. Petersburg.) Ludwig had, therefore, the corrupt Czarist family top-dogs in his pocket when Ludwig joined Robert and arrived in Baku with a plan to do for Russia what Rockefeller had done in the USA.  – And, Ludwig was another Rockefeller. He had the ability and moreover the scientific and technical knowledge which had always alluded Rockefeller personally, although the Standard boss very much appreciated science and engineering, to build a new industrial empire and so he did. It was called the Nobel Brother’s Petroleum Producing Company.

Within a few decades Russian oil production surpassed that of the USA! By 1885 it had reached 10.8 million barrels! One reason was that Ludwig had invented bulk tanker shipping! Instead of the barrels that had to be manhandled on ox-drawn carts and primitive boats all the way north, Ludwig came up with the idea of pouring all the oil into huge ship borne tanks. He commissioned special ships that did little besides bulk-up on oil and head north. The first bulk tanker was sailing the Caspian in 1878. Ten years later bulk tankers would be sailing the Atlantic Ocean. Yet oil had to traverse the Caucuses Mountains to get from Black Sea Batum to Baku on the Caspian Sea, or vice versa, and for Russia itself the Caspian shipped oil then had to be manhandled once again at Astrakhan onto barges fit to sail north up the Volga River.

Interestingly Ludwig and Robert pioneered two important developments in Russian industry. One was the use of scientists in charge. The first geologist on an oil company payroll, anywhere in the world, was in Baku at Robert’s most advanced refinery (scientifically, engineering-wise, and technically) in the world. The second was the Nobel’s decision to put labor relations at peace; acceding to the demands of local workers for a decent way of life. Both worked, especially the latter. That would turn out to be important.

Lenin’s Boys

Thus, the rise of the first militant organized labor movement in Russia along the Baku-Batum petroleum corridor is at first rather surprising. In fact, it was here in the first years of the coming century Joseph Stalin would arise as the boss of Russia’s first successful organized labor unions, and simultaneously he became the most important in-country organizer for the newly emerged Bolshevik Party led by the revolutionary intellectual chieftain Vladimir Illych Lenin (who at that time was in exile in London.) Stalin (Koba) (and his other soon-to-be famous comrades) would give Lenin the two things he needed most in 1903. What Lenin needed first was a real and militant, not to mention successful, organized labor movement with a permanent union in the oilfields. – And, secondly Lenin needed money and he got that via bank, stagecoach and steamship robberies, conducted by Leonid Krassin and his” boys.”

Krassin’s “boys” were just boys. For example, Stalin started working for him in 1894 just before he turned fifteen. One can imagine the effect a grown man of intellectual and real world accomplishments like Krassin would have had on boys like Koba and why he had been hero-worshipped by the boys he recruited. Stalin soon rose to run these “expropriations” or “exes” as they were known among Social Democrats, to be the man in charge. Lenin made that decision when he decided to move Krassin further up the ladder of penetration inside the Czarist regime and get him out of the line of fire. Even so Lenin would later jokingly refer to Krassin as “the finance minister of the Bolshevik Revolution.”

Meanwhile Stalin made the Bolshevik Party the first financially independent working class vanguard Party in the world! In addition to Stalin, Krassin handed Lenin a proven loyal capable cadre. Now they were “Lenin’s boys.” They included, not only Koba, but the future head of the entire Red Army, Kliment Voroshilov, and future President of the Soviet Union, Michael Kalinin. Soon Lenin elevated both Krassin and Stalin to be members of the Bolshevik Central Committee.

In the 1880’s Caucasian oil was being consumed in the Russia’s by industry as lubricants and by domestic consumers in the form of kerosene for lighting. Half of this was owned directly by the Nobel’s. As in the USA the real-world market was confined largely to their respective nations and Europe. That was about to change as initial phase (primitive) imperialism (shipping of constant capital – i.e., machinery and the factories containing said machinery to cheap labor colonies) was about to advance into a new phase (advanced imperialism), as the capitalists were about to raid each other’s markets.

The capitalists struggled to get control of Asian and African countries in search of their raw materials and the cheap labor they wanted to exploit them. Of course, the search for oil would be a principal target. The result of both of these practices (market raiding and colonial subjugation) would be the World War of 1914; but that was still several decades into the future. (Not to mention the other most important reason the capitalists launched the world war, which was their need to kill as many million supernumerary workers as possible, which was not yet on the horizon.) But, history was moving fast. The Nobel’s would prove adept at seizing the moment. (At this moment – January 2011 – the gringo ruling families have the same need – i.e., to kill as many millions of you supernumerary U.S. workers as possible.)

Rothschild’s in Russia

Two Russian independent capitalist oil producers tried to build a railroad across the mountains from Black Sea Batum to Caspian Sea Baku in order to get their oil to the European market. They were locked-out of the north by the Nobel monopoly on Russia, and this was their only choice. But midway they ran out of money and their rescue came in the form of the intervention of the famous French-British finance capitalist family the Rothschild’s. Namely a massive loan to the Russian independents that brought the already oil involved family into the most important producing oil area in the Old World. The Rothschild’s owned a major refinery on the Adriatic Sea and had built a strong market in Europe proper. But, they also saw the need for a secure source of more crude oil. Russia would give it to them. With Rothschild’s money the Russian independents completed their railroad from the Black Sea port of Batum to the Caspian port of Baku in 1883. The Rothschild’s proceeded to take majority control of a new corporation which included their Russian independent partners in what they called the Caspian and Black Sea Petroleum Company (Bnito). Baku was now an oil port as important as any other despite its land-locked character.

Building the Newspaper; Building  the Party

As a matter of interest it was the arrival of sailors carrying “copy” for Lenin’s newspaper Spark (Iskra) to be printed in Batum and Baku which would provide the entry Lenin needed to get his material into Russia’s northern industrial centers. Stalin and his men used the distribution network from Batum and Baku of petroleum products as the vertebral chord for Bolshevik Party organizing as far north as Moscow and St. Petersburg, and everywhere else in the Empire for that matter.

At any rate Bnito and therefore the Rothschild’s would soon become Number 2 in the Russian oil producing world. They were about to be joined by the Rockefellers via Standard at an even higher level than before.

 Koba Acts to Change the World

Note that in these days the seminaries were producing revolutionaries like hot house plants. Not only in Trans-Caucasian Russia, but also in Georgia and Armenia. In Tiflis (Tbilisi) as a member of the Social Democratic organization, Joseph and other seminarians met revolutionary factory and oilfield workers, studying in secret, and immersed themselves in these workers activities.

They were studying Russian translations (done by George Plekhanov and I.I. Skvortsov-Stepanov) of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels principal works including Marx’s Capital Volume One. Caught reading these materials at the seminary Joseph was expelled in 1899. Over the next five years Krassin continued to instruct Koba in the finer points about organizing workers, and robbing banks, stage-coaches and steamships.

Krassin was such an obvious and enthusiastic capitalist that the Czarist secret police missed him altogether, and thus, missed his most promising student, at least until Koba had learned enough to survive prison and exile. As the years of organizing along the Caspian passed Koba would be arrested, imprisoned, exiled and escape, multiple times.

In 1900 Joseph met his first face-to-face intermediary to Lenin. Arriving in Tiflis (Tbilisi) from internal exile in that year was Victor Kurnatovsky who had met their future leader while in exile (Lenin had been exiled to the Siberian town of Minusinsk at the time he knew Kurnatovsky) and come under his sway. Kurnatovsky told Koba about Lenin whom he described as a genius who would lead them all to victory. By this time Lenin had been released, having served his prison sentence and had made his way to London.

Unlike other émigrés Lenin arrived in London with a plan of action. Sewing circle reading and discussion groups would give way under the new leader to a secret professional organization of militarily organized combat revolutionaries. The central instrument Lenin proposed to implement the policy of the General Staff of the Revolution was a newspaper. The following year, 1901, The Spark (Iskra) began to arrive in Tbilisi via sailors on shore leave at the Black Sea port. Joseph became a follower of Lenin among the Social Democrats; at the time of the split of the RSDLP into its Bolshevik and Menshevik factions in 1903, Joseph, now known in the Party almost always as Koba, joined unhesitatingly with the Bolsheviks.

Inside Snapshot

Stalin’s First Victory

“I can’t believe it Comrades. Every single worker has walked out of the oilfield. Baku as well as Batum is ours!” So spoke Koba (Joseph Djugashvili; Joseph Stalin) leader of the Black Sea and Caspian cells of revolutionary social democratic workers.

“I know. I can’t believe it either. This strike of 1901 will be remembered as the workers good omen in starting our century.” So spoke Kliment Voroshilov.

 “I think The Spark did it for us.” Mikhail Kalinin injected. “The workers are paying attention to our newspaper. They know us as real workers and they see that we can do something besides talk. Most of them can’t read but they love hearing the newspaper read to them. Our editor Ulyanov (Lenin) is a genius. He speaks to them as if he were one of them, even though he is really a very well educated Russian intellectual. Yet, in his defense and to his credit they know he comes from a progressive family, and that his brother was murdered by the Czar in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. Anyway, what do we do now?”

The leader sounded a note of sobriety saying, “Before we start sucking each other’s dicks we should remember without Leonid we never would have gotten this thing off the ground. After all it was he who broke the news about the invention of rotary drilling in Texas and the Spindletop gusher so that it was timed with our action informing the workers of what the capitalists intended as a result. It was then, when the workers found out the bosses were going to increase the working day to eighteen hours seven days a week, they revolted.

“It was exactly as Marx said. Exactly as our paper has been saying. Every invention that should serve mankind is instead turned into a weapon for oppressing working people. They saw all this just as we had predicted and then they revolted.”

“Where did you get Krassin anyway Koba? Why is a capitalist manager and entrepreneur helping us?”

“Actually, he got me. It was my last year at the seminary when I went to the lecture on oil technology he was giving. It was for the technocrats but I managed to get in. I was trying to get up-to-speed on how the industry works so I could organize to shut it down. I learned he was a secret Social Democrat because he told me so. He was as interested in triggering a strike as I was!”

“I didn’t think we would get this far Koba, anyway since we did, what do we do now?

“I think we have to use the Workers Strike Committee. It needs to demand recognition of our union, a reduction from the sixteen to a twelve hour working day and for only five days a week and eight hours on Saturday. And wages should be doubled immediately and food baskets prepared for families at the employers expense.”

“What else?”

“Ask the workers. That is always the key Lenin says. – And, let’s get the rest of the copies of the new Iskra out and around while we still can.”

Batum was already a big town on the Black Sea, as Baku was on the Caspian, in 1863, when it was discovered that the American form of drilling, featuring a cable lifting- And-dropping an iron bit, could bring huge quantities of oil up from only sixty feet or so of depth.

By 1900 Lenin had reached Zurich, Switzerland, and begun publishing a revolutionary newspaper for workers. The Spark (Iskra in Russian) was being smuggled into the working class towns and cities of the Czarist Empire. The following year, 1901, followers of Iskra, and therefore of Lenin, were actively putting the prescriptions of the newspaper into effect wherever they could get an audience. In the Caucuses, future Leninist leaders had taken the reins of revolution in hand and were secretly sneaking into the oilfields and organizing workers to fight for socialism. – And, they meant fight! Georgia was full of guns so everyone Georgian and Mongol (Tatar) who worked in the oilfield had guns and were capable of conducting and enforcing an armed strike.

Among these organizers were these three young men we have just visited. They had emerged in the oil capital of the Empire around the Caspian Sea, as the leading elements in Iskra’s call for socialist revolution in Russia and the Empire. “Koba” whose real name was Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili (soon to be known by his pen name of Stalin or the man of steel), Kliment Voroshilov (eventually commander of the entire Red Army) and Mikhail Kalinin (future President of the Soviet Union were leading this armed strike).

As we have seen, Stalin’s original nickname of Koba had been taken by him after reading a novel about a romantic hero of that name - Georgia’s legendary Robin Hood. His friends would use that name for him for the rest of his life.

“What about the Tatar (Mongol) print shop at Baku?” Stalin asked Kalinin.

“It’s ready to go Koba, and not a second too soon either.”

“Yeah the Okhrana is going to close in on us here shortly we better get the press moving as soon as this meeting is over tonight.”

“No. Now. We may be arrested tonight.”

“You’re right. Kliment can take it to Baku right now. Okay Voroshilov?”

“Yes, Koba I’ll go right now. The press is already crated and the supplies. The horses and the coach are standing by as we speak.”

“Until we meet again in victory. – And, I have to get on with this new “ex” (for expropriation – meaning bank robbing and other armed hold ups) while we can still take advantage of the gendarmes disorganization. We need to get that money to Lenin as soon as possible.”

“Try and stay out of jail comrades. At least until we win this strike.” – And, the future Red Army chief was out the back door and on his way.

*****

In 1901, following instructions received via Iskra, Koba threw himself into organizing the oilfield workers and organizing armed strikes at Baku and Batum and then into organizing bank hold-ups stage-coach and steamship robberies and other armed “expropriations” (known as “exes” by the Bolsheviks.) Shortly after the 1903 formation of the Bolshevik Party, Koba (and another named Kamo), under Krassin, became the number one in-country “provider Team” of cash to Lenin’s cause; organizing for example, the Great Tbilisi Stage-coach and State Bank Robbery that netted Lenin some 250,000 gold rubles!

In other words, at just the right time Koba provided Lenin with the two things he needed most: (1) a real organized labor movement which had won armed strikes and put their union into the oilfield on a permanent basis and (2) money. This was the first successful organized labor movement in the Russian Empire and it was Leninist thanks to Koba and his fellow Bolshevik organizers. The Bolshevik Party had also become the first financially independent working class vanguard Party in the world; again thanks to Koba and associates. Lenin recognized all of this and began to put Koba on the top of his list of people to be pushed ahead.

Among these principal organizers in Georgia were not only Koba but his closest friends including Kliment Voroshilov, future head of the entire Red Army, and Michael Kalinin, future President of the Soviet Union. Emerging under them were teen-agers like G. K. “Sergo” Ordzhonikidze, (1886-1937) eventual commander of Trans-Caucasian Red Army during the Civil War (and the Party there), and one of the supreme leaders of the USSR (Commissar for Heavy Industry 1930-37). Of course, Leonid Krassin continued as the senior advisor of this Young Communist cadre.

Taking on the Rothschild’s: 1901

As we have seen there were three major international oil concerns operating in Russia at the turn of the century; those owned by the Nobel’s, the Rothschild’s and the Rockefeller’s. All three were well represented on the Caspian, especially in the oil cities of Baku (Caspian Sea) and Batum (Black Sea) where Koba had risen to be the de facto chief of Russian Social Democratic Labor Party strike organizing operations by 1901. Having built a union in the oilfields, the following year Koba took on what he considered to be the weakest of the foreign oil combines. Namely, that of the Rothschild’s.

As the unfolding began, the strike once again brought out the Czarist troops and gendarmerie. Koba and his associates jumped into the fight with guns and every other weapon they could get their hands on and the fighting was underway. Remember these oilfields were part of a Trans-Caucasian culture where virtually every person was armed as part of everyday life. Workers had guns available. So as Czarist troops burned the workers quarters and shot down men, women and children daring to engage in open protest and refusing to work, they were actively opposed by armed and angry fighters.Koba’s teams of armed workers fought back and forced the cops and troops to retreat or face hundreds of burning wells. The capitalists decided this was a higher price than they were willing to pay and called off their troops. The workers won the strike and went back to work with a union! It was the first Social Democratic victory in an armed strike and it electrified the Empire.

The Caucuses Burning

  Meanwhile in Switzerland, Lenin was thrilled to learn that his brand new newspaper was considered by the Czar’s secret police, and by his own Party, as responsible for the Caucuses being in flames. Lenin had believed from the moment of his arrival in Zurich the previous year that the Czarist regime was very weak and open to direct attack by workers. Workers could and would engage in massive work stoppages regardless of the sacrifice in wages required to do so. Furthermore, he had proven that workers would take up arms and fight for socialism whether or not Russia was considered by bourgeois intellectuals to be too primitive for Socialism. All the workers needed was encouragement and that came from the underground newspaper Spark (Iskra). The text or “copy” to be printed was smuggled to Baku on the Caspian via ships with friendly sailors landing at Batum on the Black Sea, taken across the CaucusesMountains and then printed in one of the underground print shops Koba and associates maintained.

All the intellectuals needed were some balls. Then they could understand that it didn’t matter whether the revolution started in Russia or in England. What mattered was that it started, and then got international, as quickly as possible. Workers with advanced industry would come to the aid of workers with backward industry, and would be more than happy to do so, since the latter would have started the conflagration that had led to their own liberation. – And, that was Lenin’s program in short. Action now for proletarian revolution. The Russian Workers Revolution would come to power in a period of transition with “the state” (Army and secret police) in its hands, and full scale industrialization would occur as workers in the advanced capitalist countries got their act together and joined in.

First in Batum, and now in Baku, Koba and his fellow organizers had implanted the Party printing presses. Code named “Nina” the Russian printing press operation by 1902, was hidden in a dugout cellar eventually expanding under several homes and city streets in the mainly Mongol working class quarter of Baku. From here, bundles of the paper were printed and smuggled as far as Moscow and St. Petersburg in the North and then to every working class quarter in the country, as opportunity provided. The distribution network for petroleum products that flowed northward and eastward from the Black Sea functioned for many years as the backbone of secret Bolshevik newspaper distribution, another gift to Lenin from his devoted Baku-Batum followers led by Koba. Accordingly this network became the vertebral chord of secret Bolshevik Party cell organizing as well.

The working class action committees of Baku and Batum had set the pace and provided the model for what workers could do in other cities. – And, Lenin knew from his growing network of informers and couriers that workers in every other city of the Empire, aware of what was happening in the Caucuses, were seeing in those committees, the model for their own organizations.

Inside the newly created Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, those who had seen Lenin as just another intellectual in exile now saw him in a quite different way. Unfortunately, some such as the father of Russian Marxism, the philosopher George Plekhanov, were simply jealous of this young upstart’s success. Plekhanov chose to see Lenin thrusting ahead of himself and felt his long suffering service in presenting Marxism to Russia to begin with, was being forgotten (Plekhanov had been one of the translators of Capital Volume One into Russian; the other translator had been I. I. Skvortsov-Stepanov) Others, like the newcomer Leon Bronstein (Leon Trotsky), initially sided with Lenin but then went over to the other side within the exile RSDLP leadership. Perhaps because they too were being sidelined by Lenin’s ability to get things done. However, their varying motivations may have been, the fact was that what would be, in the Russian revolutionary workers movement, was being decided on the ground, and Lenin had all the troops.

The Empire Atremble

Even Lenin was surprised when his as yet unmet leaders in the Caucuses, principal among them being Koba, succeeded in 1903, in organizing the most eventful workers action in the history of Europe since the Paris Commune of 1871. It came in the form of a national general strike that not only shut down the oilfields of the Caspian Sea and everywhere else but also shut down every industrial city in the Russian Empire. For a moment the Empire wobbled. Could it all be over that fast?

In theory yes. Marx had said in the Communist Manifesto it was just a matter of workers changing ownership of the means of production, putting themselves and those in need among the people, at the top of the national priority list, instead of at its bottom, as the capitalists had done, and you would have socialism. Eventually, with the abolition of private property you would have a paradise on Earth where all the advantages of industrial production would be at the service of the working people rather than the other way around as the capitalists had arranged it. - And with publicly owned means of scientifically advanced industrial production, making the slogan “from each according to his ability to each according to his need,” a reality, you would have communism.

But, what about the resistance of the exploiters? Surely, they would mount powerful counter attacks. The capitalists were already sending the Czarist secret police (Okhrana) in huge numbers; the Army and the Cossacks could not be far behind.

The Revolution of 1905

The Third Organizational Step: The “Councils” of 1905

The General Strike of 1903 left the Czar’s top advisors unanimous in wanting to start a war to refocus national thinking off of the internal problems confronting them. Rather than seeking social reform with the liberal capitalists and the new class of petty bourgeois intellectual and educated bureaucrats, the Czarists preferred to start a war. This time they planned for a successful war. A war that would give them profit centers in Korea and China (the province of Manchuria.)

The problem came when they failed in their elective war. They had chosen the wrong victim. Japan. In this case the Japanese nation was prepared, although ruled by a small tight-knit coterie of formerly feudal aristocratic and noble families. Families that had kept the discipline of their rule over slaves and serfs while voluntarily transforming themselves into capitalist ruling families. As they applied this feudal discipline to their rule over workers they were able to catapult themselves into the modern industrial world of international capitalism.

The Okhrana, focused as it was on internal dissent, had missed all of this. Russia acted as if it had not known of Japan’s industrialization and its immediate application to the construction of steel war ships with fully modern big guns. (See James Cavell’s novel Gai Jin for a good background to Japanese industrialization.)

The setting chosen by the Russians for their conflict was Korea. But, in the event, the Czar’s Army and Navy proceeded to disgrace themselves in a series of embarrassing military debacles. The war climaxed with virtually the entire Czarist fleet being buried at sea!

In St. Petersburg on Sunday, January 22, of 1905, hundreds of thousands people gathered under the banner of a Priest and marched to the winter palace – the city was the capital of the entire Russian Empire – to protest high prices, unavailability of food and fuel, the waste of the War just lost, in a petition to the Czar for redress. They were fired upon by Czarist troops loyal to the regime and hundreds were killed, thousands wounded, and hundreds of thousands running in fear. Fear always turns to anger.

In response the Russian nation rose up. Many in the capitalist class, hitherto allied seemingly inextricably with the feudal Lords, intermarried and interbred, wanted west European style parliamentary democracy, as did the liberal bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie - especially the New Class of technocrats upon which the Czarist Regime depended increasingly. The farmers rose up under their Socialist Revolutionary Party leaders demanding redistribution of land along the lines they imagined it had existed before Peter the Great. The workers rose up under their political parties: the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. As the year progressed the Bolsheviks began to get the upper hand among them. – And, along the way individualists such as Leon Bronstein (Trotsky) arose to espouse their own doctrines and acquire in the milieu of revolution their own following.

Trotsky cut out his following from the masses gathering around the St. Petersburg Council (Soviet is the Russian word for Council) as he was Vice Chairman of that body and an exciting and effective speaker. In Petersburg itself, the Bolsheviks gained a mass following in the workers quarters which was also reflected in the City Council, The Bolsheviks also prevailed amongst other contenders in Moscow where they were even stronger than in Petersburg. In Russia at large, Bolshevik agents were busy. Throughout the Empire Bolshevik agitators were spreading the disease of “socialism” as if they were in fact the proletarian revolutionary bacilli of which Lenin so often spoke. It wasn’t just “talk” they were spreading around but a lot of organization as well. Organization for what? For an armed uprising they planned to launch in the near future. In the end the Czar outfoxed the revolutionaries and crushed the Petrograd City Council and along with it the rest of the revolutionary councils that had arisen throughout the nation.

Bolsheviks on the Move

But the real story lay behind the scenes as Lenin rushed from his Swiss HQ in Geneva to the safest Finnish border region closest to the Russian frontier and the cities of St. Petersburg and Moscow. Simultaneously he built a substitute “base” in Galicia (then a province of Austria-Hungary) positioned as it was on the Czarist frontier. From these safe areas the Holy Trinity (now Lenin, Krassin and Bogdanov) would run agents in and out of the cities of the Empire and oversee the shipments of arms and ammunition by sea and by land to the insurrectionary staging locales at Petersburg and Moscow and as they could to the secondary centers scheduled for armed uprising. From these locales Lenin and Krassin also exercised direct control over financial resource identification and recovery (the “ex’s” or “expropriations”; bank robberies, steamship and stagecoach holdups, in everyday terminology.)

The news arrived in Geneva on Monday, the 23rd of January (1905), and within a week the Bolsheviks were on the move. What did this mean? Among other things the time had come to separate the boys from the men as Litvinov, Kamo, Koba, Krassin, et. al., stepped up the bank robbing and arms purchasing and the Iskra smuggling networks were switched to the smuggling of arms and ammunition as well as specialist fighters as trainers for the new working class Bolshevik soldier recruits.

Lenin Enters the 1905 Revolution as Boss of his own Party

The End of RSDLP Unity

The previous year (1904) Lenin had decided to “ditch” Iskra as it was too heavily influenced by Martov and his Zurich centered Mensheviks. Lenin had published One Step Forward, Two Steps Back as a definitive explanation to Russian workers as to why the Bolshevik-Menshevik split had occurred to begin with and concludes with the ringing conclusion that “Mensheviks are Traitors.” Replacing Iskra for Lenin and the Bolsheviks was a new newspaper they called Forward (Vpered).

Forward’s first issue arrived in the Empire in January 1905. Perfect historical timing as the aftermath of “Bloody Sunday” was just beginning. – And Lenin’s new Party line – armed insurrection as soon as possible – was in process and had a perfect substrate upon which to work.

As the winter ended and spring began strikes continued to spread throughout 1905 in the cities of the Empire; and throughout the oilfields and mining districts and in the port cities of the Far East. The Czarist regime closed all universities and High Schools and tried to step up the suppression of any and all open gatherings. The regime outlawed all trade union activity.

Lenin interrupted his Chief of Operations tasks in Finland and Galicia to attend the 1905 3rd Congress of the RSDLP in London (April 25 – May 10th) which he had organized to be a rump Congress, all Bolshevik in membership. Simultaneously another 3rd RSDLP rump congress was held by Martov and was all Menshevik, in Zurich.

Lenin returned to continental Europe May 30 (1905) visiting his home base in Geneva first. - And, he returned victorious as the de facto chief of a Marxist pure new Party, and as a member of the RSDLP (b) Central Committee as well as editor of the new newspaper Proletarii which was Forward renamed.

From March through October Krassin’s men had been gathering money, making huge arms purchases and arranging for their transport by sea and land to the Bolshevik staging areas inside the Empire. In October Lenin set the date for the uprising. It was to begin in 120 days – i.e., the following March (1906).

On October 15 (1905) the revolution began to spiral completely out of Czarist control as another General Strike shut the country down industrially altogether. As commerce broke down city lights began to go out. Remaining schools closed. Shopkeepers shut their doors. Theaters canceled performances. Water supplies began to fail. Food stocks including bread supplies fell to dramatically dangerous lows. Business collapsed in every major city as did basic infrastructural necessities, like gas, electricity, coal, water, the postal service, and civil police and fire functions disappeared. Now the bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeoisie joined in as they too realized the current situation could no longer be tolerated – they chose to try and move the Revolution in a direction they could at least tolerate if not actually support. Chief hope for the progressive elements of the capitalist class were the Mensheviks and so the New Class entered as supporters of Martov’s gang.

Meanwhile, the working class was acting on its own, and rather spontaneously, which shows the previous five years of Iskra propaganda had done its educational job. Workers established a new kind of government by electing a Petersburg City Council (Soviet is the Russian word for council.) Leon Trotsky got his fifteen minutes of fame when he was elected a Vice Chair of this City Council on October 26th (1905). Within a week fifty seven other cities and towns had followed the Petersburg example electing City Councils (Soviets) as their own representative bodies to take over governmental responsibilities. State power, however, (the army, navy and police,) still remained in the hands of the Czarist autocracy and not the people and their elected representative bodies.

Panic stricken the Czar and his gang issued a concessionary statement on 30 October, 1905, which they labeled “the October Manifesto.” The tyrant agreed to a Parliament (Duma) and to a Bill of Rights (ostensibly respecting freedom of speech and assembly) as well as the abolition of censorship of the printed word, and the regime agreed to allow workers to legally organize trade unions. This was, of course, a lie. A trick to mislead the masses and to split the conservative elements away from Lenin and the radicals. The Czar and his ministers had no intention of honoring their promises.

As they propagated this set of lies to the intellectuals and workers in Petersburg, Moscow, and the other industrial centers, the Czarist regime unleashed the Black Hundreds in pogroms against Jews all over the Empire. In the villages, all those known to be disaffected from Czarism were murdered, along with their families and friends.

In November the Bolsheviks responded with more armed strikes and armed uprisings in Petersburg and Moscow. Lenin arrived secretly in Petersburg in order to command the now raging civil war with hands directly on. On his way Lenin stopped at Tampere, Finland, where the local Reds had established a city government and welcomed him with a heroic reception. In exchange they got his promise that when the Bolsheviks seized state power in the Empire the Finns would receive complete national freedom.

In mid-December (1905) the Czar moved against the Petersburg City Council disbanding it and arresting its leaders (including Leon Trotsky who was held in prison in Petersburg until November of the following year (1906). On the 16th of December (1905) Lenin, reacting to the rapidly accelerating historical situation, ordered the beginning of the final armed struggle with Czarism to begin in Moscow.

Workers, in December (1905), armed by Lenin, rose to fight the police and Army garrison in Moscow’s Presnya district. The Moscow garrison retreated, outfought and ideologically subverted. The Czar sent the Semenvsky Guards to suppress the Moscow (Presnya) revolt. The Semenvsky Guards had until then been stationed in Petersburg to perform the same function. They began with artillery shelling of the entire working class district which resulted in many thousands of women and children dead along with their fighting men. The Moscow revolt was effectively destroyed.

The Joint Social Democratic Congress of 1907

As we have seen Lenin had come to rely upon Stalin, as his main in-country organizer and fund raiser, by the time of the 1905 revolution. During the 1905 Russian Revolution Lenin and Krassin came to depend primarily on Stalin to get things done. Stalin had a wide range of working-class political contacts and was developing an even wider range of bourgeois contacts including those of the underworld as a result of his prison experiences which had only begun. Lenin would, in the subsequent years, up to the October Revolution in 1917, rely on Stalin to carry out the most dangerous and sensitive and the most important secret tasks confronting the Party. But it was at the RSDLP joint Congress (both Bolshevik and Menshevik factions participating) in London in 1907 that Stalin and Lenin cemented their friendship and collaboration in the great debate over the “exes” (expropriations).

All the bourgeois socialists including Leon Trotsky, were opposed to Lenin’s program of expropriations (bank hold-ups, and other armed robberies to finance Party activities, organs, and the press) – strong-arm work of which he had placed first Krassin and Kurnatovsky in charge, and then in practice Stalin, Voroshilov, and Kalinin, had taken it upon themselves to conduct specific operations - and which policy Lenin defended in open debate against the Mensheviks and Trotsky at the 5th (1907) RSDLP Congress in London. After all, Lenin argued, the aristocrats and bourgeoisie had stolen all this money from the people to begin with and it was only right for the people’s champions to expropriate it on their behalf. Lenin dismissed his opponents politically, considering them bourgeois sissies, and went on with the business of building his own (Bolshevik) Party. A Party which of course did not include Trotsky or any of the other bourgeois socialists (Mensheviks.) For Lenin it was politics not personal.

Stalin, however, as we have also seen, pictured himself as a kind of “Robin Hood” of the Revolution. He had, for example, in these early years taken the name of a legendary Georgian Robin Hood, “Koba”; it was his “Party name” until he took the name of Stalin, the man of steel. Koba remained the name his friends would use for him all of his life. The anger Koba felt toward the haughty Trotsky was not so easily assuaged.

 However that may have been, at that Congress Lenin also handed Stalin much of the responsibility for organizing the secret financial investments of the Party in a variety of Russian banks; arranging transfers of cash and securities to Party safe-drops in West European banking centers, and so forth. – And these are just a few examples of the important secret work that Lenin entrusted to Stalin from that time forward.

Stalin vs. Trotsky I

Stalin’s first conflict with Trotsky occurred as a product of this 1907 RSDLP (5th) Congress debate in London, and went far to shape his dislike for the man he considered to be an “aristocrat-bourgeois” socialist. In a short time a mutual hatred emerged between these two. Hatred destined to shape so much of the Party’s future experience. If Trotsky had been less aristocratic in his bearing and less presumptuous toward those doing all the work, and taking all the risks, perhaps even showing appreciation for those such as Stalin, the latter might have been less likely to politicize his personal feelings. I suspect Stalin’s feelings were hurt and he did politicize them.

I imagine that the more Stalin thought about Trotsky, the exact kind of privileged person he hated the most, and his absolute failure to understand the dedication and importance of his (Stalin’s) work, the more he internalized his hatred of Trotsky, until it was part of the marrow of his bones. Stalin “went off” on Trotsky within weeks of the beginning of the armed struggle in 1918 and I don’t think it was just because of their principled military disagreements. However that may have been, before this was all over Stalin would bury an axe in Trotsky’s head. Albeit via a surrogate and far from home.

The Congress Itself

The Fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party was the last meeting where the two factions (Bolsheviks and Mensheviks) met together as if they were one Party. The 5th Congress was organized entirely by Lenin and his closest European general staff members. Lenin dominated the Congress from beginning to end – always on his feet, arguing, cajoling, ridiculing, explaining, in short, leading. At hand were his most important money men – Leonid Krassin, Koba, and Maxim Litvinov. Krupskaya stayed behind to oversee business in Finland including the forwarding and housing and feeding of delegates sneaking across Russia in order to gain the freedom of European access to London.

The Congress had been scheduled for Copenhagen but Denmark’s government had forbidden it at the last moment. Then Sweden fell in line with the demands of the Czarist regime to deny the RSDLP access to a locale in Stockholm. Lenin had brought about 188 delegates via the Finland route and now they had to go to London where the Brit government expressed no concern about their meeting in London (thanks to the intervention of Labour Party leader Ramsay MacDonald on their behalf). Showing up were a total of 366 delegates of mixed factional affiliation, and Left celebrities Maxim Gorky and George Plekhanov. The Congress lasted three long and intense weeks beginning May 8, 1907. In the end Lenin got everything he wanted including:

1.A class war policy of armed uprising against the Czarist regime;

2.This class war to be led by the Party (which he made clear meant the RSDLP under Bolshevik control or a separate RSDLP (b) altogether; a worker-farmer class alliance under this vanguard to conduct civil war against Czarism and capitalism in general;

3.The expropriations would continue by the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks could do as they wished.

4.Bolshevik deputies would continue to participate in the Duma to achieve what access to the cap Press they could and to give their own Press issues to take to the workers in their ghettos.

Inside Snapshot

Stalin Reporting to the Caspian Bolshevik Party on the Congress of 1907

 “This is going to be a long report so let me suggest all of you get comfortable. If you don’t mind I will stand and walk around as is my habit, as you know, while I speak. When I get done you can ask whatever questions you like. Alright?”

“Yes Koba,” said someone.

“I arrived in London after a rather harrowing escape from Czardom at the Lithuanian border. Eventually I made my way to the sea and a friendly sailor helped me hop aboard a tramp freighter, ending up rather luckily at London port.”

Stalin continued explaining what had been agreed at the Congress concerning the details of Iskra publication and distribution. That was a little much for this audience. They were all anxious to hear what the Congress had decided on what to them were the key questions of “democratic centralist organization of the Party” and “expropriations (bank robbing and other holdups) by the Party.” All present urged him to get to the meat of the thing.

“Alright, I’ll skip over the rest of this for now. As I was saying, after a close call with Czardom on the Lithuanian border, I gave the Okhrana the slip and managed to get aboard an outbound ship. I got lucky and snared one ride, rather than having to switch transport half a dozen times; landing at London’s principal port after which I reported to the address I had been given. It was the residence of Lenin and I was immediately welcomed and thanked and treated like visiting royalty. He insisted I live with him while in London. He really appreciate everything we have done and told me again and again to pass this on to each and every one of you. Lenin himself had tears in his eyes when he said Koba I am counting on you and your comrades. Please, please tell them I said this.”

Perhaps Koba spent too much time on these details because his colleagues once again urged him to get on with it.

“As usual all the Mensheviks, and their running dogs like that prick Trotsky, opposed our democratic centralist mode of organization. They spout their usual bullshit about Lenin being a would-be Robespierre. Lenin responded that they were free to do as they wished because we Bolsheviks were building our own Party.

“Then they really went wild when Lenin told them the armed robberies and bank holdups would continue as long as the bourgeoisie and aristocrats exercised unchecked power over the working people. He said it was only right that the exploiters should provide the cash we need, especially since they stole it from the working people to begin with. In effect he told them to go fuck themselves.”

Stalin’s audience broke into applause at this. Their leader not only stuck with them but had thrown the whole thing in those spoiled rich bourgeois faces in exile. They had stuck with him when it was most dangerous and yet most important (the money) and now they had been vindicated!

Ten Years Later

Inside Snapshot: Cementing the Bond – Loyalty Written in Stone

Who Will Kill Whom?

Speaking quietly to the man lying next to him was Vladimir Lenin. Head of the Bolshevik Party. The night was October 26th, 1917. The seizure had just been completed; they were on the floor of a room at the Smolny Institute – Stalin’s new office as Commissar (Minister) for Nationalities, as a matter of fact. Stalin had been in charge of Lenin’s personal security and had been hiding him, up and until these two days of the seizure, in a secret location (known only to him) in Finland and then in the working class Vyborg district of Petrograd, as the movement of armed men (Red Guards and the Petrograd Army detachments), got underway. These two were now lying side by side in sleeping bags, thinking and talking out loud before trying to force themselves, at their comrade’s insistence, to get some sleep. They had just seized state power! Victory at last. The first and forever most important step.

To paraphrase:

“Joseph, I wanted to talk to you here among ourselves – just you and me. You see Joseph (at this moment Stalin’s eyes had begun to tear up. Only his mother had called him Joseph) you and I have a common bond none of these others will understand. I know about your wife. You know about my brother. They will never understand the way we do about why we will never accept anything but the ultimate that we can get. Until we kill each and every one of these parasites we have not won. Furthermore until we create the sociocultural substrate upon which we will build our future – now, not a thousand years from now – we have done nothing. Killing these individual bastards is something you and I have to do for personal reasons. Killing their system is a concomitant. Our comrades will never understand this. We have to make them feel our pain if we expect our comrades to do the job now at hand. Our comrades must come to understand the capitalists will never give up such a large expanse as this, and it is now who will kill whom?”

 Maxim Gorky in 1912, calling Vladimir Lenin “…a bandit chief now without bandits” continued to prove the inability of the naïve intellectuals of the Russian bourgeoisie to understand the task at hand. Gorky’s “objectivity” implied the caveat that Bolshevism’s “cash is king” policy, with regard to financial resource identification, was a low road. That was the view the Russian bourgeois intellectuals came to have about Lenin. Now five years later Lenin and his bandit chief Stalin had pulled it off. Shortly thereafter all of these bourgeois intellectuals were put on ships and deported to Europe. The matter was resolved.

The 1917 Revolution in Russia: Stalin Returns

At any rate, when Stalin returned to Petrograd from his prison sentence exile in Siberia, following the February, 1917, overthrow of the Czar, he immediately began putting his extensive network of Party and “Other” contacts back together. Creating, as he went along, many new contacts of a variety of kinds throughout the revolutionary milieu of those six months from February to October. As for example by structuring a new alliance between the Left Wing of the peasant oriented, nevertheless bourgeois, Socialist Revolutionary Party and the Bolshevik Party. These “Left SR’s” would join the Bolsheviks in forming a new Government when the seizure took place, acting as a de facto willing ally of the Bolsheviks, rather than as members of the SR Party. – And, this is but one example of what he accomplished in this period.

As a Bolshevik Party Central Committee Member for many years, Joseph Stalin was one of, if not the, senior Bolshevik Party leader in the revolutionary capital of Petrograd when he arrived in that city, in the early Spring of 1917; having taken the simple expedient of a train ride from his exile in Siberia. (Lenin was still in Switzerland; Trotsky, even if he had been there and he had not yet returned from New York City, was anyway not yet a Bolshevik.) Stalin took his seat in the Petrograd Soviet and in the other organs of working class power in the revolutionary capital; but he was quiet and voted very carefully, if at all. His job was to prepare for the return of “the Boss.”

In other words, Stalin was doing what Lenin said the Bolshevik Party should have been doing in his absence. Of course, Lenin understood the importance of the stall- And-retreat activity of all of his men on the spot, including those who appeared to have been collaborating. Some would have to participate in the various forums as dialogue had to go on with full Bolshevik participation as far as the press and the public were concerned; that meant taking whatever positions one had to take to stay to the Left but not too far – until the Boss got back.

It was Stalin who hid Lenin during the July (1917) days (when the bourgeois government attempted to smash the Bolsheviks and kill Lenin) and kept him in a secret location in Finland until the eve of the October Revolution. Of all those on the incipient (thus the first) Politburo chosen initially as the committee to lead the insurrection (the seizure committee in other words evolved into the Political Bureau – Politburo – of the Bolshevik Central Committee), this role of Stalin’s was perhaps one of the most important. Why? Because only Stalin knew where the leader was and he had to bring daily reports back and forth from the Boss to the Insurrectionary Headquarters.

It was only natural, after the success of the October (1917) seizure that Lenin would continue to depend on Stalin. Why? To keep doing all those things he had been doing all along (for at least 17 years) we have just reviewed; a man proven in his ability, and therefore profoundly capable of handling the great secret tasks awaiting; so it is easy to see why Lenin handed Stalin the formal responsibility of heading up the Party’s secret department. Stalin had always, from the beginning, and for many years, been the chief of secret operations, at least to the degree that he could be (and during incarcerations he was often temporarily out of action.)

Flash Forward

Before I went into the field in Peru, in 1977, (See Volume 3 of the "Idaho Smith's" Search for the Foundation!" series entitled Shining Path, The Peruvian Revolution, Jason W. Smith, 2003, Writers Press, Boise, 246 pp.) I was quite naive too. My real world experiences as described in the above cited autobiographical series, especially volumes 4 and 5 (Rivers of Blood! and High Finance South American Style), changed all that. These books are self-explanatory in terms of understanding people’s fundamental at-bottom ideas, and how they got them, and why they will continue to entertain them, until such time that contemporary society evolves to a much higher level.

So, it became rather easy for me to understand both Lenin and Stalin - because I was there at the same point in life. First, rather naively, with Lenin; later, more sophisticatedly, with Stalin (figuratively speaking.) That’s why I have sometimes commented that when my Peruvian sojourn was all said and done I had rehabilitated Comrade Stalin. (Go to the website WorldCat [World Catalogue] and type in my name, Smith, Jason W., for a complete list of university libraries, and their distance from you, for these and other books I have authored.)

Back to Hegel

Working out the dialectics of history by reading Hegel once again in 1914-1915, Lenin came to all the right conclusions about what had happened and what to do about it. Actually he already knew what to do about it - that was to encourage a revolutionary upheaval among the workers and in the Army. Now, after studying Hegel again, and this time mastering him, Lenin understood how the labor movement had been dialectically transformed into its opposite.

So the Bolsheviks, from the first (1914), had been busy boring-from-within the Army of the rotten regime of magnate capitalists allied with the Dukedoms of Feudal Capitalist Imperial Russia. The Bolshevik objective became one of turning the struggle of the workers and farmers onto the road that was in their interest, rather than to continue along the road of capitalist and feudal interests, onto which they had been misled.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks had the slogan. It was to turn the imperialist war into a civil war; soldiers to shoot their officers; workers to seize the factories; farmers to take the land.

What to do about Agriculture?

Note: The Bolsheviks did not propose the immediate collectivization of agriculture. They had only a tiny base among the farming masses and couldn’t do anything in the countryside anyway. Of course, they wanted to end private property everywhere, including in land, but in practice they decided to pursue a policy of simply letting the farmers take the land as their private property. The farmers were doing it anyway – seizing the vast private estates and dividing it up among themselves. Despite a few Government declarations to the contrary the Bolsheviks accepted what the farmers had done spontaneously and accommodated themselves to it, demanding only the surrender of grain and whatever else might be needed, as needed. This policy was often referred to as War Communism.

This Bolshevik policy enraged the Socialist Revolutionary Party leaders and they would end up being liquidated after they attempted to assassinate Lenin in 1918. They had their own crackpot pie-in-the-sky formula for agriculture which did not feature small farmers as independent proprietors.

The European ultra-left as represented by such out-of-touch with reality spokes-people as Rosa Luxemburg criticized the Russian Bolsheviks severely for this attitude to the farmers (who they also wanted to collectivize immediately) and in their respective countries, as in Germany, isolated themselves accordingly from the farming masses and in the end this would be their undoing.

For example, in the middle of the Bolsheviks toughest year (1918) the one person you could always count on to draw the completely wrong tactical conclusions from agreed upon strategic data – Rosa Luxemburg – had this to say when not wringing her hands:

“The Leninist agrarian reform has created a new and powerful layer of popular enemies of socialism on the countryside, enemies whose resistance will be much more dangerous and stubborn than that of the noble large landowners.”

The truth was far different. In fact it was this decision of Lenin’s to let the ignorant Russian peasant mass – much akin to Bison on the US Great Plains before the coming of the White Man - some 100 million totally illiterate and uneducated Neolithic level farmers (terribly unproductive) – do as they would with the land, as long as they supported our Government, that was a stroke of genius.

You couldn’t do anything with these people anyway. Not until their level of cultural achievement (in this case culture meaning education) had prepared them to be more than farm animals. – And, it is exactly as farm animals these Neolithic farmers had been raised by their Masters and Mistresses under one sadistic dictator (Czar) after another over the previous several centuries.

 Had Luxemburg used a little common sense she would not have found the newly formed (autumn of 1918) German Communist Party isolated from the farming masses, and farm originating workers. All these newly liberated Russian farm animals, cum capitalist farmers, cared about, was getting land of their own and raising and selling their crops and animal products on the only kind of market they knew about (the countryside capitalist marketplace.) Lenin let that go with the caveat, to paraphrase, that “the farmers have to have capitalism to survive and produce for now; but they don’t have to have SR and Menshevik propaganda to survive and produce - so we have had to, or soon will have to, liquidate this bourgeois press, permanently.”

Luxemburg failed to realize that the German farmers of middle and lower ranks as well as her landless farmers and agricultural workers were not much different than Russian farmers. She should have learned from the Bolshevik experience to handle the farming masses with kid gloves. When Bison stampede the “race” of the humans (White or Indian; the “Lone Ranger” or “Tonto”) in front of them is irrelevant.

Luxemburg failed to recognize the intense nature of the peasant desire to be a capitalist farmer. For millennia these oppressed, essentially Neolithic, farmers had believed if they could just own a piece of their own land then the world would be perfect. (It would take time, experience and education to guide them in a better “collective” direction). At any rate, for this failure she paid with her life.

Conversely, the Russian Bolsheviks had avoided precisely this conundrum simply by being very non-naïve (real world cognizant) and doing what common sense dictated, if you wanted the soldiers and the food to fight and win a great civil war! Of the principal Bolshevik leaders it would be Trotsky who would be the first to recognize that Lenin’s decision to let the farmers go ahead and do as they would with the land of the aristocrats, the rich farmers, and their church, had been a nearly fortuitous accident which had made all the difference in the civil war in Russia; a nation that was 90% small farmer.

One must assume Lenin saw the same advantage that lay in the motive ascribed to him by the SR leaders, who believed Lenin saw that newly propertied small capitalist farmers would find it absolutely necessary to take up arms and fight to hold onto their newly gained land and therefore would be obvious recruits for the Bolshevik’s new Red Army. It was that Party and its Army after all which had given them legal title to the land (as least as far as they were concerned the Bolshevik proclamations in support of their seizures was legal authorization.)

Lenin saying (to paraphrase) “the farmers are going to do it [take the land] anyway so we might as well go along with them for now” and this decision of Lenin’s had given the Bolsheviks the support (the conscript farmer soldiers) they had to have to win the Civil War. – And, the food to feed them.

Trotsky in the winter of 1919-1920, working among farmers of the Urals, went on to advocate the reintroduction of a market economy and the elimination of “war communism” (forced collections of grain and the issuing of IOU’s) as soon as possible, otherwise they (the Bolsheviks) were going to lose them (the farmers – 90% of the country.) It would take Lenin another full year to agree.

For a real flavor for what the Bolsheviks confronted among the farming peoples of Russia (and the Empire) I recommend my favorite Soviet author Mikhail A. Sholokhov and his Don novels (And Quiet Flows the Don; The Don Flows Home to the Sea and Harvest on the Don).

At any rate, the mechanics for the seizure of state power had been worked out by the Russians in the 1905 Revolution. “Councils” (called “Soviets” in Russian) had been established in St. Petersburg in that year, as well as in cities and administrative units throughout the empire. These council’s or soviets were the then contemporary re-creation of the communes of Revolutionary Paris (and part of the Program of the Working Class Government for all of France in 1871.)

The job, in Russia and its Empire in 1917, would be to reestablish these councils or “soviets” and to put armed force (the state) in their hands. It was the job of the Bolshevik Party and its cadre to see that new councils or soviets were formed as soon as possible everywhere and to plan to take all power as soon as possible, in their name. The Paris Commune model was about to be replaced by our new “Leninist” model.

Revolution in Russia: Lenin Returns

In February of 1917, hungry people, led by working women of the city, rose against the Czar in Petrograd (the Czar’s wartime name for St. Petersburg; the city eventually to be named after Lenin.) The bourgeois leaders, unhappy the Czar had proven unable to do anything except kill large numbers of workers and farmers through his military incompetence, seized upon the working peoples uprising to overthrow the Magnate-Ducal Regime and replaced it with a capitalist “provisional government.” This “government” made the serious mistake of allowing all political exiles amnesty, and the right to return. Perhaps because, given the demand of the masses, it had no choice. After the return of Stalin et. al., it was Lenin’s return that everyone was waiting for.

Lenin made his way back to Petrograd in a “sealed” train that left Switzerland, passed through Germany and entered northwestern Russia by way of Scandinavia. The “sealed” part was something Lenin set up so that he could deny he was doing what he was doing.

What was that? It wasn’t exactly new. The German rulers had been making contributions to the Bolshevik treasury throughout the war years. They knew Lenin and the Bolsheviks. - And now the biggest decision of all had to be made with regard to their erstwhile friends.

Lenin was pursuing an enormously important financial deal in Berlin with the General Staff of the Wehrmacht (German Army) on this trip! This bunch of parasitical Junkers (landed German noblemen) were certainly no Bolsheviks. But, they knew Lenin would take Russia out of the World War, if he won the coming struggle for power in Russia. They knew he had a chance, and that was why they had been financing him and enough reason for them to bankroll him again – this time all the way.

Nor was Lenin attending the Wehrmacht General Staff Meeting with hat-in-hand. Lenin had his own sources of money as the Germans were well aware. What they didn‘t know was that Leonid Krassin, having worked his way into the Czarist War Production Ministry, was providing Lenin via the “provider teams of expropriators” more and more money as he directed these teams to the best pickings for armed robberies. (Krassin’s number one helper, Joseph Stalin, was in exile in Siberia, so others were doing the work.) Accordingly, the Bolshevik press and payroll was well endowed and growing. The Germans knew Lenin already had money and that what he needed was even more money; money he could depend upon on a regularized basis. Money that would be ever present, at hand, to accomplish his forthcoming objectives. Number one being to take Russia out of the World War. The Germans had been invited to contribute to the Bolshevik treasury and had done so, hoping they would keep a place for themselves in Lenin’s good graces. Lenin gained their enthusiastic support for this the final push. The German’s also agreed that, in addition to their present new funding agreement that, if he were to seize power they would immediately enter into friendly military arrangements to support his regime, including shipping weapons and most importantly modernization equipment for his war industries.

Arriving in Petrograd with plenty of cash and more on the way, being bank wired from Germany to Sweden to Finland; a small army of financial agents left behind in place to physically handle the transfers; Lenin was ready to kick some ass! (Before this was all over Lenin would get at least 50 million gold rubles from the Germans.)

Lenin wasn’t naive about money, nor about the class enemies he confronted, nor anything else, except that undiscovered country of selfish and sadistic basal imprinting that was nearly as strong in the oppressed classes (including the working classes) as it was in the masters and mistresses and the boss hierarchy of society. A common defect, if you will, of all Marxists at that time.

In Petrograd, Lenin immediately began preaching revolution against the capitalist provisional government - first on the platform of the Finland Station - just after stepping off the train. There, hundreds of thousands of workers and their families, along with deputations of soldiers and sailors, and an honor guard from one of the (previously) Czarist ships in port, formed a tumultuous crowd greeting their hero, Lenin. It was the biggest - by far - reception of any foreign leader coming home, in the months after February and before October of 1917.

Suffice it to say that Lenin found his own Bolsheviks collaborating with the enemy “Provisional Government,” bourgeois to the core, with a smattering of right wing “respectable” socialists of one stripe or another. What they the workers, and their Party, the Bolshevik Party, should have been doing instead, he said, was to be preparing to strike out and destroy the bourgeois regime. He went directly to the workers of the Petrograd City Council (Soviet), explaining to them their historic task and with their enthusiastic support he was able to rearm the Party. His control over the funds needed to publish all the new Bolshevik newspapers and pay the entire new cadre, didn’t hurt either.

The Party was rearmed in 1917 by the document we know as The April Thesis. Then the Party was hammered by Lenin into seizing power in October through letters and demands (by July he was again in hiding from the secret police; only Stalin knew where he was, having been assigned this role of protecting the maximum leader by the Seizure Committee – i.e., the original Politburo) and with the book State and Revolution where Lenin went back to Engels and made his central point:

As Engels said, (to paraphrase,) “the ‘state’ is the product of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms and arises in the hands of those who can pay their thugs to suppress the masses.” This meant that the Bolsheviks had to seize state power from the class enemy - build their own “state” and establish a proletarian dictatorship over the enemy. In so doing they could THEN proceed to construct the socialist world order!

“The proletarian state is a machine for the suppression of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat. Such suppression is necessary because of the furious, desperate resistance put up by the landowners and capitalists, by the entire bourgeoisie and all their hangers-on, by all the exploiters, who stop at nothing when their overthrow, when the expropriation of the expropriators, begins.” (V. I. Lenin, 1919, Letter to the Workers of Europe and America, Pravda, January 24, 1919.)

Understanding What the “State” Is Told Lenin What Had To Be Done

I put this in bold for a reason. Because Lenin’s correct understanding of the nature of the state – any state - is the key to our understanding Lenin’s success in introducing the Stage of Stalinist Socialism onto the world historical stage.

“Every state, including the most democratic republic, is nothing but a machine for the suppression of one class by another” (V.I. Lenin, Letter to the Workers of Europe and America, Pravda, January 24, 1919) as Lenin put it fifteen months later.  

He knew he had to overthrow the bourgeois government. The time had come to do it.

The first reason Lenin had to act was the scientific conclusion mandated by the correct General Theory of historical materialism, and he had Engel’s summation of Marx’s work on state origins to quote directly to prove his point. (See The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Frederick Engels, 1888)

Now we have my study which archaeologically confirms the prehistoric emergence of classes and the state, happened exactly as a product of the class division of society where exploiter ranks had become exploiting classes. These classes would have both the need and the financial ability to use thuggery (army/police power) to establish and then to enforce their dictatorship. A summary of that study’s conclusions has been incorporated above, in this book, in my discussions of the sequential stages of pre-capitalist sociocultural evolution.

The second reason, Lenin determined to act when he did, was a tactical matter that required audacity (balls) to do what theory tells you to do because the time is ripe. The capitalist Regime was weak; the Bolsheviks had just won the elections. There was no reason to wait any longer and every reason to act before the enemy got a chance to put some bullshit parliamentary system into effect. A system the bourgeoisie would, of course, dominate.

The Bolsheviks Seize State Power: October 24 - 26, 1917

(November 7 – 9, 1917 western calendar)

Knowing what had to be done; Lenin forced his Party leadership to resolve to seize power by force of arms. The story of the seizure has been told by the participants and direct observers including Leon Trotsky, John Reed (the American observer of these events who wrote the internationally famous book Ten Days that Shook the World!) and Joseph Stalin. We need not go over it here except to say that rather quickly first Petrograd and then Moscow and many other cities, came under Bolshevik military control. But the question then became: Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power (the title of one of Lenin’s books of that time.)

Off on the Wrong Foot – Trotsky Alienates the Old Bolsheviks

Lenin believed it was Oregonian John Reed who was responsible for giving the outside world the idea that the entire Bolshevik Revolution had been conceived carried out and successful only because of what had happened in Petrograd in the month’s preceding the seizure October 24 – 26. – And, by the relatively peaceful October seizure of power in Petrograd when the capitalist Provisional Government was replaced over a period of two days by the Bolshevik Soviet Government. Lenin didn’t mind Reed’s somewhat myopic view of events because what was important was that news of and about the Revolution be presented to the world in the best way. After all with Reed limited in language, and access to the rest of the Russian Bolshevik Revolution, what else could he have done? What Reed wrote in Ten Days That Shook the World was so beautiful and indeed archetypical of what a Bolshevik Revolution should ideally look like, that Lenin decided to take what they had been so lucky to get, discretion being the better part of valor, and worry about the details of the All-Russian reality later on.

The seizure had been hard fought and violent in Moscow, Kursk, Samara, Minsk, Kharkov, Tiflis, and Kiev and in many other cities of the Empire. Only in Petrograd (St. Petersburg; Leningrad), thanks according to all participants and observers (including Joseph Stalin) due to the excellent work of Leon Trotsky, was the seizure relatively peaceful. Petrograd was the capital of the Empire, and thus was one tactical key to success, and therefore, Lenin’s decision to bring Trotsky into the Party three months earlier proved its wisdom in the event.

The Old Bolsheviks, however, who had fought the hard fight in at least 20 cities of the Empire, where it had been touch and go in the armed struggle for days and sometimes weeks, became quite angry with the way Trotsky was presenting the October Revolution. Indeed, Trotsky did just what Reed had done except in much more detail, but the Old Bolsheviks who were the new Governmental and most importantly Army Officers were enraged. Furthermore, they didn’t care what Reed told the English-speaking world. They cared about what Russians thought!

The new officers and non-coms in the Red Army thought Trotsky was involved in a cheap power play. They believed Trotsky’s real intent was to deprive them of their just honors, and rewards, for having fought tooth and nail, killing all opposition, in order to establish the proletarian dictatorship.

Typical of those who grew to hate Trotsky, for this among other things, was the future War Commissar and chief of much of the Red Army’s armies, colleges, and staff schools, Mikhael Frunze (1885-1925). Another was the perhaps most colorful general of the Civil War Semyon Buddeny (1883 – 1973) and still another Vasily Konstantinovich Blyukher (1889 – 1938) who commanded striking victories during the civil war, and commanded the Chinese KMT Army. – And, finally, among the most important of the youngest Trotsky haters was Sergeant (1920) George Zhukov who would go on to be the Soviet’s most important military chief (Five Star General – i.e., Marshal – and military chief of the Red Army High Command [Stavka] in 1945.).

Farmers Were the Strategic Key to Success

Lenin decided to throw the Bolshevik lot in with the farmers. Ironic that the chief of the most orthodox worker’s Party in the world should have had the insight to recruit the mass of the Empire’s people almost overnight because of a wise political pronouncement; namely do what you will with the land!

“Our victory was made easier by the fact that in October 1917 we marched with the farmers, with all the farmers. In that sense, our revolution was a bourgeois revolution. The first step taken by our proletarian government was to embody in a law promulgated on October 26 (old style), 1917, on the next day after the revolution, the old demands of all the farmers which Farmer Soviets and Village Assemblies had put forward under Kerensky (the man Lenin overthrew - ed.) That is where our strength lay; that is why we were able to win the overwhelming majority so easily. As far as the countryside was concerned, our revolution continued to be a bourgeois revolution, and only later,” (V. I. Lenin 1919 Address to the First Congress of the Communist International.)

Time to Govern, Campaign Promises

Having overthrown the bourgeoisie the Bolsheviks had now to begin the real job of governing. At first most of this consisted of (A) cosmetic proclamations because there wasn’t much else one could do overnight. By cosmetic I mean such things as changing the names of Ministries to Commissariat of this or that. – And, (B) “socialist government model building.” For example, during the first weeks of the Revolution, Petrograd State Radio and the Government and Bolshevik press issued a long series of new laws to show what Socialism would have done, in the event they failed to hold onto state power longer than a few months. These radio producers intended to leave a “model” of what a workers state and government would look like, much as the Paris Commune had earlier left a more primitive model. But the real Bolshevik bosses were much more confident, and as history would soon prove, with good reason.

 Also the Bolsheviks had (C) campaign promises to keep, such as (1) abolishing ranks in the Army and (2) giving the land to the farmers. Socialist proclamations of these sorts demonstrated the Government’s desire to move in a fully socialist direction even if it didn’t have the wherewithal at the moment.

However, history had outrun the pre-seizure Bolshevik program, by which I mean ideas about abolishing military ranks, and farmers seizing land, were ideas which the Bolsheviks were no longer entertaining. Now the army was theirs and this new Red Army needed officers, NCOs, and absolute discipline. Socialism was their ultimate program for farming (mechanization and collectivization) and the idea of a nation of small capitalist farmers (having divided up the land of the Lords for themselves) was no longer something the Party was interested in.

By “not having much they could do overnight”, I mean that if this revolution had happened where it was supposed to (in classical Marxist terms we had expected an advanced capitalist country to take the point) the next day’s business could have been a rather smooth transition to workers ownership of factories and the bureaucratic introduction of the Party’s program more or less by the same people doing these things the previous day. However, Russia was where the revolution began because of the peculiar historical circumstance of V. I. Lenin and his ability to create an armed seizure, so Russia had become the “trigger” for world revolution.

All Marxists in Russia, including Lenin and his Bolsheviks, agreed that Russia could not be the homeland of world socialism precisely because it had not achieved the minimal necessary industrial or agricultural base. But it could become and in fact had become the trigger of the world proletarian revolution. At any rate, it would be in the area of propaganda, education and cosmetics that the Bolsheviks would first make their mark; then become equally well known to the world in the arena of military affairs.

Six Weeks Later

Establishing Proletarian State Power Part I – The Police

Inside Snapshot RCP Politburo - December 20, 1917, Petrograd

Chairing and speaking was Vladimir Illych Lenin, Premier of the New Government. His audience this day in Petrograd (St. Petersburg; Leningrad) – December 20, 1917 - was the Political Bureau of the soon to be named Russian Communist Party (b) (previously, the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, Bolsheviks, renamed as above March 6, 1918.)

 “Comrades, you all know how serious the counter-revolutionary threat is to our government aing the procurement of weapons, explosives and munitions. Strikes are being organized by the same in some of our key sectors including banking and finance. So far we have been able to conduct limited operations against all of these threats utilizing our most loyal followers in the working class and within the Army. You all know Felix Dzerzhinsky who has been at the head of these special operations – especially those designed to protect our leaders from assassination. For manpower he has been able to rely heavily upon his own Latvian brothers in arms in the Rifle Division, as well as our Red Guards. Comrade Dzerzhinsky will proceed with a detailed report and set of recommendations.” The baton passed. Dzerzhinsky, seated, reported.

“Comrade Politburo members, I am passing to each of you a copy of a Top Secret File, numbered one of seven, two of seven, etc. This file details each conspiracy we have detected. In each case we have sent in penetration agents to provide us with a steady flow of data and to be ready to act in a definitive way upon receiving orders. I will not read it to you. You can do that yourselves.

“In the meantime let me say that what I believe must be done and Comrade Stalin agrees, is we must create our own Okhrana. Yes, we have no choice. We have to create a secret police force to expand our counter-revolutionary vigilance and surveillance and it must have action units capable of carrying out orders to liquidate our enemies when so instructed or when it sees itself the need to do so. For the moment I have created the name “All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-revolution, Sabotage and Speculation.” The initials will inevitably lead to its being called the Cheka for short.”

“So, Comrade Dzerzhinsky” spoke Nicolai Bukharin “barely two months after the workers and soldiers and poor peasants have seized power we are to recreate the Okhrana? The very organization which created hardship, misery, slave labor camps, torture and death against our class and indeed against us ourselves?”

“Yes Comrade Bukharin.”

“Well, I agree. We have no choice. But it is somehow very ironic is it not?”

“Yes. Hopefully, it will be most ironic for our class enemies. These are after all the worst people who have ever lived anywhere on the planet Earth and it is high time that they faced the consequences of millennia of oppression of working people and a multitude of enslaved nationalities.”

“Here, Here…” from everyone at the table.

“To begin with Comrade Stalin and I suggest we utilize eight commissars – one for each department we foresee as necessary – and a small but sufficient staff of our most reliable and intelligent comrades. Also, we need authority to investigate, enter, arrest and execute enemies of the people on our own initiative. Give me this manpower, subject to continual increase as need arises, and this legal authority, and I promise you I will stamp out every vestige of counter-revolution, given sufficient time.”

“How much time will you need to get a grip on this situation?” asked Lenin.

“We have Petrograd close to being secured from domestic enemies but not from foreign invaders and they will come as you know Comrade Lenin.”

“Yes.”

“In this capacity I have found it necessary for planning to anticipate a civil conflict of several years duration. Perhaps a full-fledged civil war with the Whites and the foreign imperialists on one side and us on the other. So, the answer is, it will take years to fully root out all of these enemies. On the other hand we can secure, often through the use of revolutionary terror, our cities within a matter of a few months.

“As I was saying the initial imperialist invasions, other than the German which it goes without saying is already on our soil and accordingly is our first enemy, will be in the north around Murmansk and Archangel. Accordingly I am already dispatching agents north of Petrograd, to begin our counter-invasion partisan operations and to establish long-lasting intelligence networks. As the fronts develop during the coming year we will be able to switch some of these individuals and perhaps entire partisan units to these new fronts to do the same thing. I have been able to find soldiers in the old army who have experience in counter-invasion partisan operations behind German lines and I am using some of them - all of them are under close supervision of loyal Party comrades. What we will need soon, and I have already begun the planning, is a Cheka school so we can mass produce field agents. We will needs thousands of these agents immediately and tens of thousands by the end of the first year.

“In short we have (i) internal domestic fronts for our Cheka commissars to attend to, and (ii) the areas under foreign occupation. Probably these domestic tasks will spontaneously evolve into the principal directorates of our Extraordinary Commission. The other sections being largely supportive in one fashion or another.

“There is the additional recommendation that the Sovnarkom, Premier Lenin and his Cabinet, be moved to Moscow from here in Petrograd. The Brits and the American’s are already making for Murmansk and Archangel. The French and Germans could invade Petrograd directly and of course would have help from the Finnish reactionaries as well, not to mention all that scum standing by in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. We will end up tying-up our best agents, and our largest manpower reserves securing Petrograd if we do not move the Sovnarkom to Moscow.

“In short, we can and are securing our major cities as I speak, but we need full police and judicial authority to do so with maximum speed. – And, this situation will go on for the duration of the civil conflict, however long that may turn out to be. After that, well, we will have to look at where we are then. That’s it. Thank you Comrades.”

Lenin as Chairman and acknowledged leader resumed his role.

“A remark to begin with. Of course, we need to move the Government as soon as possible to a safe locale and that will obviously be Moscow. But, not yet. To move now would make it seem what it is – we’re on the run. If we get peace from the Germans and the Ukrainians, or at least Germany is in the process of signing a formal peace, then we can move and do so in triumph. But, we don’t have long. The imperialists will soon see, if they haven’t already, that our best forces could be crushed by a strong White Guard attack supported by their naval forces and marines, as long as the seat of Government is here in Petrograd. I have got to have a German peace first and we’re depending on Comrade Trotsky to get that for us.

“Now as to the topic at hand, what do the rest of you think?” Lenin asked.

Gregory Zinoviev spoke first. “I think for now we should separate judicial and police authority. Not that I don’t have full confidence in Comrade Dzerzhinsky, because I do, but because it is our intention to establish our own truly just system of Justice and I would like to see that get underway simultaneously with the creation of this police entity.”

  “Anyone else agree with Comrade Zinoviev?” Lenin asked. “Because I tend to agree with him. For this very reason; we need to get our Justice system off the ground as soon as possible. But, given the conditions we now confront, and given the necessity of preserving ourselves before all else, these judicial authorities must be directed to work hand-in-glove with our new Extraordinary Commission at every level. After all, that is the way all capitalist governments work, and we must assume they know how to hold on to state power and simultaneously enforce their own system of Title Deed justice. If the White conspiracy and their alliance with the Mensheviks et al, proves to be too dangerous we can grant full judicial authority then – next week, next month, whenever. For now, can we all agree to support the recommendations of Comrades Stalin and Dzerzhinsky with this slight modification?”

All seven Politburo members present who were the only ones eligible to vote raised their hand, following Lenin, whose hand was already raised, indicating that there was a motion on the floor and that the time had come to vote. Stalin voted in favor of his amended motion. Dzerzhinsky being a guest remained silent. In this way the Sword and Shield of the Proletarian Revolution came into existence on December 20, 1917. A date which would be immortalized in Soviet history and would become the pay day date for many succeeding decades in the Red Secret Service. (The Soviet Government finally got its German Peace Agreement and moved quickly to Moscow.) Almost as an afterthought, Lenin remarked:

“I forgot. Should we not ask Comrade Dzerzhinsky to take command of the Extraordinary Commission?” Lenin asked. The others agreed by voice vote.

“Now, to continue with our morning’s agenda, let’s hear from Comrade Trotsky on negotiations with the Germans. Then Comrade Stalin again. This time on his negotiations with the Ukrainian Central Rada. – And, then from Comrade Stalin once more. This last time on the other work of the Nationalities Commissariat and the upcoming Congress and accompanying Declaration on the East scheduled for the Congress of Nationalities next month. First things first. Peace with Germany. Comrade Trotsky please take over.”

Establishing Proletarian State Power Part II – The Army and Navy

Ranks Abolished for Three Months

Trotsky saw to it that Army ranks quickly returned under new names (1918), and Stalin eventually restored the officer’s ranks under their old names (1935). Following the fateful accession of Hitler to power in 1933, the Congress of Victors in the winter of 1933-1934 and the December 1934 assassination of Leningrad Party Boss Sergey Kirov, Stalin was gearing up for the next great mobilization of the Soviet people, turning his attention to fully modernizing Soviet armed forces so as to be prepared to deal with any imperialist onslaught. – And, the Congress of Victors (January 1934) marks a point only eighteen months prior to the first shot of World War II being fired against Bolshevism -  the fascist uprising in Spain (July 1936)!

The older Russian system of rank names allowed officers and NCO’s to carry their accomplishments on their sleeves, shoulders, collars or whatever, and these new officers were all educated according to Bolshevik doctrine. Stalin, accordingly, decided to reward them for their service during the great struggle for collectivization. An additional new rank of Marshall of the Soviet Union was introduced and Hero civil war Generals we have or will discuss in this volume, including Generals Tukachevsky, Voroshilov, Buddeny and Blyukher (also known as Galin in China where he led half of the Northern Expedition in 1926-1927 establishing a Left KMT government in Wuhan as I describe in the following chapter) were among the first to receive the honor in 1935.

For our purposes in this handbook I shall simply refer to Soviet officers by the English equivalent term for their ranks regardless of what name was applied in Russian; as you can see there were two wholesale names change in officer’s ranks and titles.

The always uneducated US Left often thinks these name changes had some (mysterious) “proletarian” significance other than what I have explained here, but they did not. Rank abolition had been an anachronism when it was announced (the original reason being to foment discord in the Czar’s army). This outdated slogan was one principal way the Bolsheviks seized power and therefore, was a campaign promise they had to keep – if only very temporarily – (three months) and at least surficially to pay lip service to the idea of comradeship and equality in the now proletarian Russian army. Or, at least what was left of it (about 300,000 troops.)

Bolsheviks in Uniform: The Army-Party

Overnight a Party of intellectuals and workers transformed into an “Army Party”, if you will, because their first task was survival – i.e., military. Out of civilian clothes and into uniform went the Party leaders. By 1918 both Stalin and Trotsky, for example, had taken to military uniforms; for Stalin it was to be the costume he assumed for the rest of his life.

The Bolshevik Government managed to survive its toughest year, 1918. In the process the major second-string leaders of the Bolshevik cause in Russia (and the world) emerged clearly for the first time: Trotsky, Stalin, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Voroshilov, Frunze, Blyukher, Joffe, and many others. (There was only one leader of the first order of magnitude among the Bolsheviks in 1918, and that was of course, V. I. Lenin.)

This Civil War, which began immediately with the Bolshevik seizure of power, had to be fought on many fronts throughout 1918. But the Red Army managed to defeat all its enemies and all the capitalist countries too - for they all had troops on Soviet territory aiding the capitalist and feudalist enemies of Soviet power during the Red vs. White Civil War {1918-1920.}1919 was a tough year, but easier; in 1920, the Bolsheviks pretty much wrapped it up.

1921 featured suppression of farmer uprisings and the mutiny of the Kronstadt Naval Garrison so the fighting did not really stop for the Bolsheviks until 1922, when the last imperialist troops (Japanese) were withdrawn. In fact, the fighting in the south, against Islamic radicals, never did stop and would continue until 1939, although after 1922 the religious crackpots of all persuasions were no more than an irritation.

Leon Trotsky, you will recall was the very late coming Bolshevik, who had opposed Lenin since 1903, and only joined with Lenin in the summer of 1917. Now he was Commissar (Minister) for War, leading the Bolshevik effort in destroying the White and foreign imperialist forces.

When Trotsky transferred from the Foreign Ministry (Commissariat) to the War Department of both the Party (Red High Command) and the Government (War Commissariat) in March 1918 he inherited a thrown together army of some 300,000 former Czarist soldiers. Beginning with this, and a massive national recruiting drive and propaganda orgy, Trotsky fought on 14 fronts in four major “theatres” (north, south, east and west) simultaneously; brilliantly employing his interior lines for defense and offense, via the use of the railroads to transport troops and materiel from one zone on one side of the Soviet Republic to another zone on the other side, and the telephone and telegraph. With his armored train full of propaganda, printing presses, and special troops Trotsky visited at least 36 different battle fronts during the course of the Civil War.

In the northern theater, against a fractionated enemy, Trotsky’s spring 1918 offensive sealed off Russia north of Petrograd (later Leningrad) from Whites and invading US and UK forces, and then during the summer and fall of 1918 he pushed the Whites out of the classical Russian heartland and into the East; and in this eastern theater, forced them into and behind the Urals, (wherein 1919 they would be re-supplied by Japan, the USA, the UK, the French, and Italians.) Then, in late summer 1918, Trotsky turned his attention to the southern theater and the defense of Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad, being defended that summer and fall by Stalin and his handpicked men Budenny and Voroshilov,) and finally went on to deal with the Germans in the western theater.

The latter collapsed for the Germans in late autumn and early winter of 1918, as a consequence of German communist uprisings at home. These revolts, in the Wehrmacht, German Navy and in the factories of Berlin and Bavaria, were aimed at establishing a “Soviet” type of power in Germany. The German capitalist gold “Trojan Horse” had backlashed and kicked the Junkers, fatally, in the head! Exactly, what Lenin had anticipated from the beginning.

The Red Army, now having more than tripled in size to 1,000,000 strong (by October 1918), saved the Bolshevik Republic in the fall of 1918 by recapturing Kazan, Simbirsk and Samara, solidifying the Soviet Republic’s eastern frontier, recapturing the Czarist gold reserve, and getting the Kazan arms factories back into production. Trotsky was in command and deserves the credit.

But, as War Commissar, Trotsky’s greatest contribution was in the reintroduction of professionalism into Red ranks which at the beginning of 1918 suffered from having been loaded with “soldiers committees” and all the egalitarianism that had gone along with the Bolshevik effort to subvert the Czarist army. Trotsky quickly reintroduced officer and NCO ranks using new titles and names, negating Soviet Order Number One that had abolished ranks in the military. (Red Army officers and NCOs would not get their old rank names back until 1935).

During the imperialist world war the Reds had propagandized against the Czar’s officers calling for democratic election of officers and the abolition of ranks. Now, however, one had to move on from campaign promises to the reality that a real tough military machine had to be created and that could not be done without absolute discipline and a super adherence to ranks (if under new names.)

Trotsky loved professional soldiering and appreciated the role that it plays in the state apparatus of whatever class happens to have state power. During 1918 he subjected the newly created Red Army to the most severe discipline and demanded obedience from lower to higher ranks of both officers and NCOs (Non-Commissioned Officers – i.e. corporals and sergeants), on the part of private soldiers. Trotsky introduced the practice of employing blocking units to prevent conscripts (largely farmers) from retreating (blocking units are positioned to shoot and kill your own men if they retreat.) – And, he introduced the policy of “decimation”, meaning the shooting of a disgraced unit’s regular officers and political officers and every tenth private soldier for failing in the line of duty.

Furthermore, under Trotsky, it was not unusual for a private soldier to be shot for smoking or talking in ranks, while supposedly standing at attention. In fact, it was this love of professional soldiering that took Trotsky to the rather strange Bolshevik position of asserting absolute discipline within the previously loose command and control structure of the Red Guards. Or, for that matter, under the relatively lenient Czarist discipline.

Stalin vs. Trotsky II

At this time the Stalin-Trotsky schism was only incipient. They both nursed old hatreds, going back to 1907. But now it was Trotsky’s love of using regular Czarist officers enraging Stalin and his military followers, who hated the whole idea. Before the Civil War concluded Trotsky had recruited over 75,000 former Czarist officers. He felt he had no choice as the Red Army grew to over five million. As long as political officers were appointed as equivalents to each of these regular officers then the Reds should have no difficulty keeping control on, by definition, “suspect” officers.

Other differences were simply those that arise whenever there is a difficult military situation and different officers have different (each justifiable) views on tactical matters. Even in strategy, such are the exigencies of war, there may be several justifiable and opposite views on how to proceed.

– And, still other disputes reflected different ideological takes on military strategy For example, Trotsky favored armored mechanized delivery of infantry forces to the battlefield; Stalin on the other hand, while supporting the locomotive movement of Army units, also favored the use of cavalry and dragoons (mounted infantry) as the shock forces being delivered on their own power (horses). Trotsky felt his approach was Marxist because of the industrial aspect of rail and truck delivery as opposed to the more “feudal” use of cavalry and dragoons. If nothing else it shows me once again what I have always found to be my at-bottom most important opinion about Trotsky and that is the extreme “shallowness” of his thinking.

However that may be, by April, 1919, the long standing conflict between Stalin and Trotsky over many strategic policies and tactical decisions, resulted in Stalinists taking control of the five man Party Military Committee (known as the Red High Command) four to one (four Stalinists, including the new Chief of Staff Mikhail Frunze, and Trotsky). – And, within the Party an officers group gathered around Stalin calling themselves the “Military Opposition”, to the strategic and tactical policies of the War Commissar.

But, the new general staff worked out just fine and Trotsky grudgingly accommodated the majority, recognizing that they had good points and were often right. By the end of 1919, victories in all four front-line theaters (north, south, east and west) made it clear that the Bolshevik government was here to stay. Which meant the Stalinist Socialist Stage was here to stay. {Although, at the time no one would have suggested it receive that name.}

In November, 1918, another Party reorganization of the military had placed Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin in charge of all military activities. A decree having been issued earlier that declared all of the SovietRepublic to be a “military camp” and that its first task was military success. In effect these three had become the triumvirate governing the SovietRepublic with one (Lenin) far more equal than the other two. Under the triumvirate every civil resource was turned over to the military. Houses and apartment blocks in the cities were taken apart for fuel, and used as latrines when sewer workers were conscripted. Whatever was needed for industrial production was taken directly from the physical stock of the then existing nation and subordinated to a new military use. It was total mobilization and it worked.

My properly congratulatory remarks about Trotsky’s role in the Civil War should not be taken to mean that other Bolshevik leaders did not play important military parts. A great many did, and as you have seen, second to none was Joseph Stalin, who, among other military tasks assigned him by Lenin, led the struggle to defend Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad) and the Red Army offensive to open the granaries of South Russia for the starving workers of Petrograd and Moscow, in 1918. – And, after April 1919, many other worker generals of the Stalinist persuasion (e.g., Semyon Budenny, Mikhail Frunze, and Kliment Voroshilov) also played critical leading roles. Stalin often being sent by Lenin as chief “investigator” of military calamities suffered by Red forces. - And Stalin continued to play a leading command role until the very end of the Civil War. For example, Lenin sent him to defend Petrograd when threatened by White forces in 1919 and again gave him command of half of the forces being sent against Capitalist Europe in 1920. (Not to mention having already given him command of the international intelligence operations and other new secret activities of the Russian Party (1917) and those of the Communist International (1919).)

Lenin’s Relationship with Trotsky

Lenin had to know Trotsky had totally fucked up the 1920 Polish-German campaign. Yet he took personal responsibility and never seems to have held this unduly over the War Commissar’s head. Why? Why does Lenin always seem to cut Trotsky so much slack? I think the answer is simple. Lenin needed a competent sparring partner.

For years he had kept Zinoviev close by in Switzerland even though he had to know Zinoviev suffered from the Russian intellectual predilection for endless talk and little physical action. I think for the same reason. That is, Lenin needed a foil. Especially one trained as a Russian intellectual, to keep fighting the mental chess games even though he might well be heading for checkmate.

Lenin’s very first relationship with Trotsky had been in London in 1903 and had been friendly. In retrospect, I think Lenin appreciated something about Trotsky which he must have recognized at the time. He had to know Trotsky was not his intellectual equal but he also had to know that Trotsky was quite bright for a Russian bourgeois (albeit Jewish) youth and reasonably enough well-read to get as far as this group of London intellectual Social Democratic bosses.

The friendly relationship lasted only a few months and for the next fourteen years the two men were often at each other’s throats. Lenin brought Trotsky on board as a political expedient, as we have discussed, in the summer of 1917. But, from that time forward – even after the final fight between the two at the 1921 (10th) Party Congress – Lenin protected Trotsky from the other Old Bolsheviks – again and again.

Why?

I think, and submit as speculation, for your consideration, that Lenin found Trotsky to be a needed foil – arguing (sparring) partner – as he developed policy. Lenin knew that none of the other Bolshevik leaders would ever really stand up to him if he argued vociferously against them. But Trotsky – because of his seemingly inbred, arrogance – always would.

Can the Bolsheviks Usher in World Revolution?

At this time the Bolsheviks were still uncertain about how long the working class dictatorship period (phase or Stage) was going to have to last before they could move on to true Communism. Lenin, in calling for a new and Third International (the Communist International or simply COMINTERN) wrote in his January 1919 “Call” for delegates from each country he picked (countries with Social Democratic Parties that had a “Leninist” type of cadre,) that he intended to fight with “…all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and for the creation of an international Soviet Republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the State.” (Emphasis added)

 {Note that neither Marx nor Lenin saw their objective as being satisfied simply by achieving the Stage of Communism; in other words to them “Communism” as a Sociocultural Stage was just one more transitional Stage to a truly human society. The term Socialism, previously used almost synonymously with the term or idea of “communism,” came into widespread usage by Leninists for the kind of society they were trying to build in Russia at the time. That is, a “transitional” proletarian dictatorship kind of society. It is that definition of the term “socialism” which has become traditional, and to which I adhere in this text. In part, Marx’s idea of Communism as a transitional stage is materialized in the way Leninists came to use the term Socialism. However, there is more to it than that. That is to say, even if part of what Marx envisaged as Communism is what we now think of as Socialism (the transitional part), part of what he envisaged is what we also now think of as that Stage no one has yet seen (from each according to her ability to each according to her desires and needs.)}

Also, the real (material) way in which super-powerful and super-abundant technology will become manifest is now much more easily seen (as for example, I am prone to frequently pointing out) in such great film events as Star Trek, than it was in Marx’s time. (It was Lenin, by the way, who called motion pictures the greatest art form in history.)

The point being that our further elaboration of the terms Socialism and Communism in the 20th and now 21st century makes it clear that both Marx and Lenin saw one or several transitional stages for humanity between Capitalism and a Truly Human society. For my part I think we can define the transition as having two “socialist” stages and the first stage of what Engels called the “Era of Freedom” will begin with Communism – which itself will be just one more stage on the road ahead. Also, this allows us the freedom to engage in fruitful cross-cultural comparative analysis of the two transitional periods in human history (1st and 2nd – each with two stages.)

Stalin’s Model

“Duplication”

  Socialist Stage Expansion over the Earth

From Day One of the 1917 October Revolution the Bolsheviks were consciously building a Model of what we came to know as Socialism. You may recall Petrograd State Radio was broadcasting, literally 24 hours per day, the new laws of the Soviet Government. They did not do this because they could actually implement all of these sophisticated socialist programs and ideas. They did it so when they were overthrown (which the radio producer intellectuals still thought was the most probable end of the Bolshevik seizure of power) the world would have the MODEL of what Socialism as a real world sociocultural Stage should look like. A new and more advanced Paris Commune (1871) in other words. However the real bosses in the Politburo were much more ambitious, and successfully so, as we have been seeing.

One of the two most important contributions of Professor Antonio Gilman to my own education was to focus my attention on this simple truth. Namely, the desired result from the first months and years of Bolshevik practical experience was to duplicate, one right after another, the pure model of socialism as developed in the Soviet Republic (1917-1924) and the Soviet Union (1924-1990).

This model projected an entire world looking like the US and its constituent States; one country after another joining the Union as history unfolded.

Ideally the world might eventually look like a Socialist Iowa with its 99 counties, each an exact duplicate of the other. That is to say each County with an equal sized amount of land, with one or a few towns. Each of these counties with a County Seat building that looks like a Statehouse. Each county with the same set of codified municipal and county laws and regulations, etc.

We can see the Leninist model beginning to take shape just by changing the name “county” to “country” and then the ongoing duplication of this structural model of Socialism in every country in the world. Of course the geographical and ethnically determined borders of various populations could never be equalized but even so each of the peoples would be given absolutely equal rights and responsibilities. Internationally, this was the practical immediate end-objective for the Party and each and every one of its cadre.

It was Stalin, who added to this view, by supposing Socialism would expand from its Soviet homeland, under Bolshevik (Comintern) aegis, to neighboring countries first. Stalin’s thesis was based on the idea that experience had shown the capitalists as a class with a universal implacable nearly psychopathic anti-communism; this meant they would continue to attack socialism everywhere. As Stalin said in 1924 (Foundations of Leninism) these attacks would become even more dangerous and vicious now that Socialism was in power because the capitalists were even more scared of Bolshevism than before the revolution.(A formalization of what Lenin had said in his Last Testament or Letter to the 13th (1924) Congress.)

As Stalin saw it as early as 1920, the future expansion of Socialism would surely require defensive war, and offensively the Red Army would be needed by Workers and poor and middle Farmers fighting their oppressors in their homelands. This need would be most easily met in those countries closest to Soviet power where the Red Army could actually get involved in protecting local Reds and extending the Socialist Stage in this cookie-cutter way.

This was the center of Joseph Stalin’s thinking about how to spread Socialism across the face of the Earth. While Stalin had nothing against revolution in lands far away from Russia he did think in practice Socialism would expand where it could be militarily and politically supported from Moscow and that would, of course, be in those nations bordering on Red Russia. But near or far every nation had to do only one thing and that was to duplicate exactly what the Russians had done in terms of constructing the Socialist Transition to Communism.

This had real positive and negative aspects which affected and directed the 20th century effort of Bolshevism to bring the entire globe into a pattern of Socialist (Transitional) construction. The model to be duplicated turned out to be the one emerging in 1934 with every aspect of a nation’s economy being centrally planned. Workers in cities in charge of industry (via the Party and its trade unions) and workers in the countryside in charge of agriculture and animal husbandry (via the Party and its collective farms.) Everyone else gets trained for technical work including professions in science and engineering.

Now back to Europe.

Lenin to Liberate Europe

The key, to speed up the global transition from capitalism to communism, seemed to lie in linking up with more advanced working classes and their industrial bases, in Europe. Marxists in Russia and abroad, had always considered it essential that revolution would occur in the advanced capitalist countries first, so that the technological wherewithal for socialism would be in existence. Marx’s theory of Historical Materialism proceeded from the scientifically derived conclusion that society had gone through a series of sociocultural evolutionary stages. Capitalism in this theory was proven to be a necessary precursor to socialism – it was a “given” that the achievements of the capitalist stage would be essential as the foundation for working class political power. Marx had differed from the utopian socialists of his time, first and mainly, in this correct scientific assessment that the fully developed resources of capitalist technology would be necessary for, and acquired first, and before revolution of the working class variety could successfully unfold.

Russia had been seen by Lenin, accordingly, as simply the “trigger” to revolution in all of the capitalist countries. Now in power, the next step forward for the Bolsheviks, seemed to lie in triggering this world revolution, especially in these western European capitalist countries (or the America’s or even Japan, yet it was Western Europe that was within Lenin’s immediate reach.) Stalin’s thesis that successful proletarian revolution would occur first where it could be directly supported politically by the Comintern and militarily by the Red Army and Navy was right in line with Lenin’s Polish, German, European campaign plans of 1920. But, there were problems.

Germany

The German workers ended the World War at the close of (November)1918, when widespread self-styled “Soviet” (German Bolshevik) revolts in the German Army, Navy and in German factories scared the industrial magnates and landed aristocrats (Junkers) so badly that the Kaiser fled the country and the First World War was over.    Then, in January, 1919, when workers could have seized Berlin and liquidated the Social Democratic care-taker Regime (a government the Wehrmacht put in power following the Kaiser’s flight, and the “surrender” to the “Allies”; a regime which the German bourgeoisie now prayed would save them from Bolshevism; a surrender agreement the care-taker government signed), and followed the Book of Lenin, they failed to do so. Instead they played at seizure and ended-up barricading themselves in several buildings, thereby managing to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory!

One important reason for their failure was the mass murder (in the World War) of millions of educated and radicalized German worker-soldiers, no longer present to play a decisive role. Another was the simple fact that there was no Leninist Party in Germany. The closest thing to Leninist in Germany was the Spartakusbund led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg.

Unfortunately, Luxembourg had unwittingly assured the defeat of the insurrection by angering the German peasantry en masse with her ridiculous call for the seizure and collectivization of all of the agricultural land in Germany. Also, alienating in one fell blow the living peasant mass of the Wehrmacht (German Army.)

In the event, neither of these two proved to be anywhere near the quality of Lenin, and they failed in the crunch, miserably. This despite the fact that Lenin had sent a team of “experts” to help. In fairness to Luxemburg and Liebknecht, Russian Central Committee members, and soon to be Comintern leaders, Radek and Bukharin (also in the politburo), must be held equally responsible for the disgusting state of affairs that had resulted in the defeat of the proletarian insurrection in Berlin. These two, being among the luminaries in the Bolshevik advisory team Lenin had sent, went on to demonstrate that it had not been them primarily in charge of the October insurrection in Petrograd and Moscow.

Lenin should have sent Trotsky (who led the hour to hour uprising in Petrograd) or Stalin (who could have led it) – people who had, or he knew could, get this thing done as they had in the past. Both were too busy. – And, it didn’t seem like it was such a tough assignment. All the Germans had to do was to stand up and repeat the offensive actions of 24 – 26 October! In this rather simple boiler-plate task the Germans proved inept. As, obviously, were their advisors.

Hungary.

Bela Kun did better in neighboring Czech, Slovak, and Hungarian territory, where Kun operated as directly under Lenin’s supervision as distances of those times would permit. To begin with, Kun met with Lenin and left Petrograd (shortly before the Bolsheviks changed their headquarters to Moscow) for Budapest armed with plenty of cash and a small army of advisors. There he raised the banner of proletarian revolution and rallied the farmers to his side by pointing out that the Russian farmers had done what the Bolsheviks told them to do and had taken the land and now it was theirs. Kun quickly built an army of workers and farmers, using Russian Red Army cadre to help out, and defeated the armies of reaction on two separate occasions; as a consequence, Kun succeeded in establishing the Hungarian Revolutionary Government.

The problem came when the new Hungarian Revolutionary Government’s “War Communism” policy emerged as the permanent policy of the Government. After the farmers had a taste of permanently “not getting paid” they opted for a different kind of government.

The ruling classes of Europe had had time to catch their breath. The European bourgeoisie got lucky. Bela Kun had tripped over the “War Communism” part of the Bolshevik effort (meaning despite good intentions food from the farmers doesn’t get paid for in any real way) as had Rosa Luxemburg in Germany. The newly capitalist farming classes turned against the Government in sufficient numbers to undercut the communist headway. As the Red support dwindled the capitalists managed to trap and defeat Kun‘s army and to liquidate his communist government. Kun and his remnant forces would end up helping Russian Red Army General Frunze take the Crimea in 1920-21, after escaping Budapest for Russia.

If Lenin had gotten to the point of ending War Communism in Russia by 1919 instead of 1921, so that Kun would have had that model (NEP), the proletarian revolution would most likely have entered Germany via the Hungarian route. At the time of Kun’s final defeat Lenin could not send sufficient Red Army forces to change the outcome. Even though the Red Army had reached one million soldiers by the fall of 1918 (and three million by August 1919) and was getting larger by the month, 1919 saw them deployed at distances too far from Budapest to reach there in sufficient time. Not that Lenin didn’t look at the possibility closely. It would be 1920 via Poland as it played out before Lenin would get a shot at Western Europe again.

Poland

Then, in 1920, Lenin decided that the Polish capitalist-feudalist invasion of the SovietRepublic had given him the excuse to test Europe once again, this time with the bayonets of the Red Army. As the Bolshevik forces drove back Polish capitalist/feudal invaders, and their French and British allies, Lenin ordered the Red Army against Warsaw.

 Thus, the previous (January, 1919) defeats of the poorly organized and led German workers would not have mattered a bit, had the forward march of Bolshevism been successful, in the summer and autumn of 1920. Once in Germany the new German Communist Party would rise to greet their liberators and the reverses of the previous year (defeat of the insurrection in Berlin and the murder of its leaders) would be avenged and the failure of the first attempt in Germany rendered moot.

Stalin was in command of the Armies on the southern pincer of the summer 1920 Soviet offensive. He accomplished his objectives, in an orderly fashion, keeping an eye all the time on the breakout of the last of the Russian diehard White generals, Wrangel, from the Crimea, which was occurring simultaneously with the Red drive on Warsaw. Trotsky, in command of the northern pincer via his hand-picked general, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, (and the entire expedition) however, faltered; he failed to properly prepare and coordinate his attack – he failed to cross the Vistula River and drive into Warsaw – a critical preliminary step to the liberation of Berlin.

Trotsky’s hand-picked men performed like amateurs, with 2nd Red Army Cavalry Commander, General Gai Gaia overshooting his objectives so far and fast, that rather than turning south and attacking Warsaw from its north, he ended up way to the west in Germany, his whole force being interned! Budenny might well have gone on and attacked Berlin but Gaia surrendered.

Tukhachevsky’s commanders on the spot, directly in front of Warsaw in the east, failed to prevent the main body of the assault from being flanked. They left their Left flank entirely open and the Poles not being fools, and officered by French and British advisors, walked right through and turned Tukhachevsky’s left flank.

(The French government sent a 400 man team of advisors and trainers to help lead Pilsudski’s army, including Charles de Gaulle who would later also win Pilsudski’s highest award for services rendered in the Battle of Warsaw 1920. Another large contingent arrived under General Weygand after the defeat of the Red forces in August, 1920.)

Why did a man of Trotsky’s ability and experience allow such amateurish mistakes to occur? What happened to Trotsky’s vaunted military genius?

Trotsky was confronted with more serious resistance by the foreign officered and advised Polish army than he had perhaps anticipated, but that was nothing unusual for Trotsky. Trotsky was a proven competent military commander at the highest level and had confronted far more threatening difficulties in the previous two and a half years, as had the entire Red Army. Furthermore the Red Army had grown to four and a half million when the project was decided and five million by the time it was underway (the largest still standing army in the world in 1920. He had overwhelming force.

The Polish-German expedition, by the way, was the focus of the 2nd Congress of the Communist International which was meeting in Moscow at the time and watching the daily combat reports coming back from the front. It was a period of the greatest excitement as it seemed as if the success of the “world socialist revolution” was at hand!    Gregory Zinoviev, Lenin’s long-time companion in exile, now Comintern President, had the previous year (1919), pronounced the European revolution all but accomplished, conjuring up the specter that the current conference would picture a Europe Red and liberated, wondering if things hadn’t always been this way. At this year’s convention (1920), Zinoviev had been jocular about his over-optimism of the year before, claiming that it might take an additional year or even two, to finish the job in Europe.

Then Trotsky balked on the VistulaRiver, dropping the ball. History changed at that moment. As history would have it the Bolsheviks would not get another shot at Europe until World War II. There was a lot of angry talk in Moscow of the “we’ll be back…and soon” variety, but it would not be until 1944.

This Hinge of Fate Had Far-reaching Consequences

After the August, 1920, debacle on the Vistula River, not only did the Red Army not get to Warsaw and then Berlin, but the Bolsheviks gave up considerable territory for peace. Shortly thereafter the armed struggle was over. – And, so was the probability that socialist revolution in West Europe would happen in time to assist Russian workers in the great task they now confronted, of having to build the capitalist mode of production (technologically speaking) they should have inherited (in the program of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, anyway.)

Trotsky turned around at Warsaw not just because there were many workers and farmers in the Polish (foreign capitalist officered) reactionary armies, but, because he didn’t have his heart in the entire project. In his autobiography (My Life) he says as much. I think he had already decided that Russia didn’t need to link-up with the more advanced proletariat of Western Europe. He had decided that Russian workers could go it alone. They just needed a firm estafette on their backs to see that they did what they were capable of doing. I offer this opinion for what it is worth.

What we do know is Trotsky started this kind of talk in the latter part of 1919. He began transferring his military armies to the rear and converting, these demobilized military soldiers into members of new “labor armies”. In the early part of 1920, he explained in Party circles, his view that labor simply needed to be militarized; he had been running the factories during the civil war that way. He was adamant in his rejection of any suggestion that the trade unions be allowed to run things, and now had converted military units into working “labor army” units in fields and factories.

Lenin stepped in at the 9th Party Congress in March of 1920, suggesting that the situation in Russia was so precarious that someone would have to protect the workers from their own state if Trotsky’s proposals were to be given credence!

In my view, Trotsky imagined that the need to link-up with the German workers was no longer a life and death matter for the success of the world socialist revolution. If he had felt differently he would have been on the spot with his armies and kept both Tukhachevsky and Gaia on a short leash. He was very wrong. – And, while history would prove that Germany was not quite a life- And-death matter for world Socialism, there is no doubt but that without advanced western European industry and labor the task confronting Bolshevism would be immensely more difficult. Trotsky’s ultimate decision to retreat at Warsaw, in August of 1920, put the icing on the cake we call the Twentieth Century.

Trotsky’s sudden conversion to “internationalism” (above and beyond that of all of the Bolsheviks) as the sole alternative to Stalin’s mobilization of the Russian working population in the Five Year Plans (meaning the rescue of Russian Bolshevism by foreign workers having seized power from their capitalist ruling class) as his principal political argument against Stalin, would come much later when he was trying to build a new base at home and abroad. But there was nothing new at all here. All the Bolsheviks and many others (such as Trotsky’s little, original pre-Bolshevik, group) had always been convinced that international assistance from the advanced working classes of Western Europe would be essential and quickly forthcoming. There was nothing new about “internationalism” to Bolsheviks. What was new was building a modern infrastructure from scratch overnight.

– And abroad, Trotsky would succeed to a certain degree, in presenting the idea of his being the champion maverick anti-bureaucrat of the Bolshevik Revolution. (A kind of Russian John McCain). However, it was a hard line to sell to most communists in the 1930’s when it was obvious to the world that it would be harder to be harder on the Soviet bureaucracy than Stalin was being.

Trotsky’s lack of interest in Lenin’s program to use military force to enter capitalist Europe and open the road to proletarian revolutionary linkage to Germany with the Red Army, had led to critical errors in the preparation of the European campaign. Overall there were many errors. Supplies were mishandled and never put into proper sequence to follow up the rapid advance anticipated. Trotsky apparently never knew even how many men he was sending under Tukhachevsky and Gaia. - And, military communications, long a sore spot between Trotsky and the Stalinists, were abysmal in the event.

In retrospect it is clear that not the least of Trotsky’s errors consisted in putting the 27 year old General Mikhail Tukachevsky (who at the time was still somewhat of an unabashed admirer of Napoleon Bonaparte) in command of the biggest army the Bolshevik’s had ever fielded (somewhere between half a million and 800,000 men out of the then five million man Red Army were assigned to take Warsaw and then Berlin.) A campaign of this size requires a supreme commander who excels in G3 (Operations and operational planning), G1 (human resources) and G4 (Supply). And, it takes time – far more time than Trotsky and his hand-picked staff allotted to prepare for the European expedition.

A (post-World War II) Dwight D. Eisenhower type of experienced military mentality would have been the far better choice. Why? Because the sheer size of “theater” operations turns the whole thing into an assembly line industrial type of operation where small and even divisional unit tactical knowledge is of secondary or even tertiary importance. In other words theater operations succeed or fail according to whether the weight of converging fronts is overwhelming, or not. A matter of size and timing. A matter of supply and full TO&E and a proper Order of Battle correctly executed temporally.

General Tukhachevsky had a string of victories to his credit by the time he received command of the European Theater’s Main Forces, from the Party. But, he had never before commanded a force of the size now contemplated.

General Mikhail Frunze, who had been with Lenin since 1903 (paying dearly for his loyalty by spending ten years at hard labor in Czarist captivity for his role in the 1905 revolution), and who had played a heroic role during the 1917 period preceding and during the October Revolution, would have been a far better choice. Frunze also had a string of Civil War victories to his credit, but they were of an entirely different variety.

Those of you aware of recent developments in what was Soviet Central Asia may recall the recent turmoil in Bishkek in Turkistan. It was here in the Kyrgyz part of Bishkek, Mikhail Frunze was born in 1885. It was then a Czarist Army garrison town. His father was an immigrant Bessarabian (Romania).

Young Michael went through the primary grades in Bishkek, High School in Verny, and College in St. Petersburg (later Petrograd; then Leningrad). In St. Petersburg, Frunze joined with Lenin in the formation of the Bolshevik Party in 1903. In 1904 he was exiled from St. Petersburg by the Okhrana (Czarist Secret Police) for participating in Bolshevik demonstrations. During 1905 he ran the local Textile Workers Union in a strike which coincided with other uprisings kicked off by the Czar’s catastrophic naval defeat by Japan off the coast of Korea.  As the Okhrana, and the Czar’s Cossacks, suppressed the 1905 Revolution in armed struggle in St. Petersburg, Frunze was arrested, sentenced to death and then pardoned to ten years at hard labor.

Frunze Seizing Moscow

Frunze escaped in 1917 and made his way to Minsk, capital of Belarus (Byelorussia) where he led the Bolshevik fraction in the Provisional Government. Then on the eve of the October Revolution Frunze moved a Regiment of Red Guards and hand-picked soldiers to Moscow under cover. On the 26th of October they kicked off the armed struggle which lasted over ten days before all enemy groups were liquidated, the Kremlin seized and the city in the process of being secured from die-hards. It was Moscow Lenin had wanted to seize first. In the event, the choice of beginning the takeover in Petrograd was proven the wiser course.

Frunze, like most of the other Old Bolshevik officers, took an early dislike to Trotsky because he, and they, felt his, and their, role was being terribly denigrated. As time proceeded Frunze had to be “calmed down” by his friends, including Joseph Stalin from time to time, as he tended, while drinking, to call for Trotsky’s execution at inopportune moments. Especially after the debacle Trotsky and Tukhachevsky created at Warsaw (below.)

Tukhachevsky played the game much like his hero Napoleon Bonaparte, in forced marches, surprise encirclements; massed use of artillery followed by rapid infantry strikes, and ultimately marched the endless columns of the rapidly expanding Red Army into areas being occupied. These occupying troops subdued by their enormous size much potential opposition, just as Napoleon had used his famous many miles long, ten men wide, columns of French farmer soldiers to subdue Feudal Europe.

Frunze in the Civil War

Frunze, in 1918 and 1919, moved methodically from town to town and objective to objective like a well-oiled military machine. So much so that the Party Press (which by late 1918 was the only press) had taken to referring to his victories as those of the “methodical Frunze”. Frunze proved to be born for high command, and had a record of excellence in logistics, and TO & E (tables of organization and equipment). But Frunze was too closely associated with the Military Opposition and Trotsky would not have him.

Despite being outvoted in the Red High Command four to one, Trotsky could always count on Lenin to support him when the chips were down and the stakes were high. Once again Lenin let him have his way. Instead of giving Frunze command of the European Theater, Trotsky sent Frunze to the south to counter Wrangel – but he waited too long for that, giving Wrangel time to offset the pace of the European campaign by threatening Stalin’s Left as Stalin approached Poland.

Tukhachevsky Concludes the Civil War

 – And, Trotsky appointed, as Tukhachevsky’s second and cutting sword, a cavalry adventurer (General Gai Gaia) to take command of the new and specially formed 2nd Red Cavalry Army. Gaia so far overshot his objective in Poland as to end up in Germany, with no choice but to surrender to internment (as his rear had by then been occupied by White Polish troops) demonstrating by his conduct that cavalry require the correct commanders too. Gaia proved he was no Budenny.

I would bet my bottom dollar that Budenny in that vise would have gone on and attacked Berlin! We will never know. But there had been no reason for Trotsky and Tukhachevsky to experiment with Gaia in the first place, except that General Semyon Budenny was another Stalinist.

You should also note that Trotsky had opposed the introduction of cavalry into the Red Army for some time, arguing instead the use of railroad transported troops, and had only come around to Stalin’s way of thinking (build up the Red Cavalry striking arm) after White Cavalry forces had so decimated his rear in the South as to force him to admit that Stalin and his men (Kliment Voroshilov and Semyon Budenny, the commander of the Konarmia or 1st Red Cavalry army) had been right all along.

However, most serious was Trotsky’s failure to assure close combat command and control of this European expedition. Trotsky was in Moscow or in the South during the entire thing. His chief opponent, Joseph Pilsudski, (in charge of both the Polish “government” he had created with the collapse of German control and his own cobbled together army) who had invaded Soviet territory, was now at the end of his tether, and was backed up against the wall at Warsaw. But Pilsudski was right with, and literally on top of, his men.

Pilsudski was left to face the Number One Trotsky had sent – i.e. Tukhachevsky - who wasn’t there either! Tukhachevsky was in Minsk – 300 miles from the battle front. Radio communications were not what they should have been and were later blamed for Gaia missing his Left turn to come down on Warsaw from the north. – And, the Red cipher had been broken by the Poles (the code-breaker won Pilsudski’s highest award in 1921) so that Pilsudski was reading Tukhachevsky’s mail and the communications of his officers.

This Polish code-breaking resulted in the British getting their hands on an “enigma” military encoder-decoder sometime after 1921 from which they built their World War II “ultra” German secret code-cracking program. This worked because the Germans had found an enigma machine too, in Poland, during the 1920 Battle of Warsaw, and they would incorporate it as the basis of their Signals and Cipher system! Thus, this German military encoding machine became simultaneously an exclusive asset of British intelligence and would play a critical role in World War II. Stalin’s penetration of that asset via Kim Philby would turn the tide of World War II at Kursk and of the post-War world with the Soviet atomic bomb. Stories for another book; which I happen to be writing entitled Red Sword, Red Shield.

Back at the ranch, outside Warsaw, Trotsky allowed an inexcusably large gap of at least fifty miles to exist between the “right” of Stalin’s forces moving on Lvov and Tukhachevsky’s “left,” heading for Warsaw. The Poles and their foreign advisors correctly broke through the massive Red onslaught exactly at that point, dealing death and destruction to Tukhachevsky’s forces on his entire, now exposed, left flank, while his cavalry army on the “right” crashed crazily forward into Germany. It was the Katzenjammer Kids meet the Bowery Boys, with Abbot and Costello thrown in. – And there was no excuse for this amateurism in combat – especially for an Army with as much experience as the Red Army in the summer of 1920. An army which had as much weaponry and munitions as it had ever had, not to mention the massive forces deployed and the four and one half million men in reserve! If Trotsky had been there this would not have happened. If Tukhachevsky had been there it would not have happened.

Trotsky’s adherents would later blame the attack of Wrangel from the Crimea for Trotsky’s “inability” to devote sufficient time to the Polish-German campaign. – And, in fairness, it is true Trotsky had to rush south to rally the forces to turn the tide back against Wrangel and force him back into the Crimea. However, it is equally true that Stalin, Voroshilov and Budenny already had the situation well in hand, at least to the degree they had one eye on Lvov as they moved forward at a measured pace and another on Wrangel – in fact, it is for that reason they were moving methodically on Poland and Germany in case their forces would have to be switched back to the south – which indeed happened in November, when the Stalinist Chief-of-Staff Frunze took command personally of the south. Frunze arrived within two weeks of Trotsky’s appearance there, and began preparing the campaign to liquidate the Whites once and for all in the Crimea (which he accomplished.) At any rate, as the Party and the Army saw it, that was no excuse for Trotsky’s Number One Campaign Boss failure to be there – General Tukhachevsky was in Minsk over 300 miles from the battle front at Warsaw.

Stalin vs. Trotsky III

– And, something of great import happened when Trotsky and Stalin fell out over how Stalin was to use his forces, now precariously balanced between Warsaw and the South – Lenin ordered Stalin to obey Trotsky (who was ordering Stalin to transfer the Konarmia – or first Red Cavalry Army of Budenny - to Tukhachevsky) and Stalin refused! Perhaps it was about this time, in the late summer and the fall of 1920, Lenin first realized Stalin was now his own man.

George Zhukov

Another man was learning important lessons during this conflict and that was the newly appointed, 24 year old, Konarmia (First Red Cavalry Army) Sergeant of Cavalry George Zhukov (1896-1974). Zhukov, beginning as a private soldier, would eventually be Stalin’s pick to command all Red Army battles of World War II. You can see he was trained in this environment and that his politics from the beginning were Stalinist of the Budenny (Stalin) variety, and why.

The War Goes On

However these developments may have been, Stalin was right to proceed carefully, as he did, closing on the eastern Polish industrial city of Lvov, near the Soviet West, all the while keeping a close eye on Wrangel in the South, as events would prove. Had Stalin followed Trotsky’s orders and thrown his (Budenny’s) cavalry forces into the Polish meat grinder (Tukhachevsky had allowed to swallow up the cream of Red Army forces outside Warsaw,) the Bolsheviks would have been severely handicapped in retaking the southern Soviet territory Wrangel had captured, and White Crimea. Frunze was going to need Budenny’s Konarmia (First Red Cavalry Army) since Gaia had lost his (the 2nd) Red Cavalry Army to interment in Germany! Not to mention the possibility that the super-inflated hopes of the imperialists with the Poles could have kept a new offensive against Moscow going from the West! (When Stalin acceded to Lenin’s orders Budenny did take a terrible beating, but fortunately was able to withdraw his forces sufficiently intact to take on their next assignment; helping retake the Crimea.)

In retrospect it is clear that Lenin should never have allowed the Polish/German expedition of the Red Army to fail. He should have gone to the Vistula, perhaps with a new contingent of whatever numbers of troops were necessary, and certainly to put order back into the Red Army, redeployed them for attack, properly prepared the reserves, and then punched through to Berlin.

 Berlin is only a hop, skip and a jump from Warsaw. The failure to take it in 1920 meant that millions upon millions of lives would have to be spent to take it 25 years later in 1945! It was the greatest single mistake of the entire Bolshevik experience. – And, it doomed the Party and the Republic to having to build “socialism in one country.”

On the other hand, had German workers been linked-up with the Bolshevik Soviet Regime in Moscow, the entire course of the 20th century would have been totally different. It is quite likely that the transition into true Socialism would have been much smoother. There would have been no Hitler – no Nazis. Instead it took until 1975 to come to an accommodation with the world Capitalist Stage, and get on with the business of constructing the industrial base for Socialism (this time in China.) With the idea in mind of later building toward Communism so that one might finally achieve the truly humanist society we now hope to see by AD 2100. (As for example one might picture as having the technology and social relations of the Star Trek era).

We know that Stalin anticipated that the Red Army would meet with the same kind of resistance in the Ukraine and Poland that it had met all along on Russian territory. He gave oral and written detailed instructions to his secret police troops and inspectors as to the handling of situations where workers and peasants had been deluded into fighting in the armies of reaction. As they had been instructed before, in the previous two and one half years of civil war in Russia proper.

Stalin was ready. If he had been in command instead of Trotsky the Red Army would have been properly prepared, equipped, officered and deployed, and might well have gone on to Berlin, after taking Lvov and Warsaw - then Milano and Paris - all of Europe might have been Red by 1922! But, it was not to be.

Trotsky’s Fall Begins in 1920

– And, the Party would never forgive Trotsky for this catastrophic failure. His power base evaporated rather quickly after the Polish debacle, because he had lost the Party’s respect and the Army’s too. No battle or campaign had ever been more important to Bolshevik success than this one, aimed as it was at linking Russian workers with advanced western European workers. In this Trotsky failed abysmally for no good reason. This perception he could not afford, given the fact that for two years the Old Bolshevik officer corps had often been uniformly opposed to his policies.

Now let us look at the consequences that did unfold when Trotsky pulled the Red Army back at Warsaw and Lenin let him get away with it. For, without German, Italian, French, English, US or other working classes to help industrially backward Russia there was nothing left for the barely born Russian Soviet Republic but to improvise. Without foreign workers to assist, the Bolsheviks would have to choose between surrendering, and building the essential industrial base.

Stalinist Socialism Inevitable – And in One Country        

Soviet Russia would have to go it alone. With, of course, those Republics that had gained freedom from Czarism and were now being brought into a greater Soviet confederation by their own Bolsheviks. This was clear to just about all the leaders of the Bolshevik Party by 1922. In 1924, following Lenin’s January death, Stalin formally called for pursuing Bolshevik objectives without foreign assistance and thus began the Soviet policy of building “socialism in one country.”

A year later, in April 1925, Nikolai Bukharin published his paper (at the Politburo’s direction) on the subject, entitled Can We Build Socialism in One Country in the Absence of the Victory of the West-European Proletariat? – And, the following year, 1926, Stalin developed the plan even more fully in his On the Issues of Leninism, (not to be confused with Foundations of Leninism, Stalin published in 1924. My favorite book by the way; the reason I named my first textbook Foundations of Archaeology.)

The Party press would soon begin every story with: Might have been, Could have been, Should have been, Used to be, would be, Will Be. Emphasis now would be on production targets, past, present and future, not for a description of the fate of various political struggles for World Socialism. After August 1928, the focus of the Party, its Government and its State, was on the achievements of socialism in the “construction fronts” of the Five Year Plans. – And, along these lines the Comintern followed.

Domestic Consequences 1921

The New Economic Policy (NEP)

In 1921, Lenin restored Capitalism in the Soviet economy because he no longer had any choice. Now that there would be no European workers to assist within the foreseeable future, a retreat from War Communism was unavoidable. 

Liquidating the First Kulaks

Committees of the Poor

The farmers had been held in de facto serfdom before the Revolution, only slightly modified to allow the introduction of boss run (“fist” or “kulak” run) capitalism in agriculture. The Reds had given the farmers the land of the Feudal Parasitocracy which they had already seized. These land occupations and seizures began sporadically while the capitalist Provisional Government was still in power and when it could it tried to send troops to “restore order” meaning get back the properties of Lords and Kulaks when and where they could. However both the SR’s and the Bolsheviks went to work after October 1917 establishing Committees of the Poor to go after the Kulaks and their land. By the end of 1918 the old Kulaks were dead or in exile. For the moment what were left were mainly small farmers and very small farmers.

The farmers knew the Whites would restore the old order, take back the land, and who knows what retribution might be in store. So, they put up with the idea of not getting paid right away – taking all kinds of specie (IOU’s) in exchange for agricultural produce the Reds needed to feed the Army and the cities.  But these newly liberated farmers had in mind becoming capitalist farmers and when the Civil War ended they expected to get paid - at least for what they had to sell now and the specie could be resolved with the Government later.

However, the Bolsheviks had not given up on their ultimate plan to socialize agriculture and wanted to continue the policy of exchange in a kind of barter form. A policy which never worked out for the farmers because the cities really had nothing to exchange.

So at the beginning of 1921 these would-be capitalist farmers, expecting the return of “normal” market conditions (as the War had concluded as far as they were concerned), were revolting all over Russia. Farmer revolts were most threatening in the Tambov region (part of classical eastern Russia) and were suppressed only by massive deployments of regular Red Army forces under General Tukhachevsky, who now reassigned to domestic “police” operations, had to resort to heavy doses of poison gas to subdue rebel forces holed up in the forestry.

The farming masses were demanding a reintroduction of a market economy; they would have destroyed the Bolshevik government if they didn’t get it – and many of those previously among the Bolshevik’s strongest supporters, such as the sailors of farmer origin at the Kronstadt naval base (which mutinied in 1921,) turned against Lenin and had to be suppressed bloodily by the Red Army.

It is important to note that Trotsky had first proposed ending War Communism and restoring the market economy after working with the farmers of the Urals in 1919-1920. It would take Lenin, as we have seen, until the early part of 1921 to concur. In this case experience on the ground had taught Trotsky that the way to deal with the farmers was gradual – accepting where they were, in their consciousness, at the moment, and agreeing to let that continue until an appropriate time down the road.

The Government had far more important things to deal with first – that is, before worrying about socializing agriculture, the Bolshevik government had much to do in the cities and everywhere else in the cultural as well as economic commanding heights it now controlled.

The new policy of “controlled capitalism” was called the NEP or New Economic Policy. {It went into effect by Lenin’s fiat in the spring of 1921; the law creating it was published on the 9th of August of that year.} It lasted through the summer of 1928 after which the First Five Year Plan went into effect.

As early as 1922 however, Nikolai Bukharin was able to outline the Bolshevik schema for Economic Organization in Soviet Russia, the title of his paper first published in March of that year (again, at the Politburo’s direction.) What strikes this observer today most strongly is the similarity between the logic and program developed by the Bolsheviks in their New Economic Policy (NEP) with that of Deng Xiaoping and associates in post-1978 China.

Making NEP Work

Stalin’s Great Industrial Espionage Program

1921

“Koba, thank you for your time. I know this Tambov thing is keeping you busy but this is important too.” Speaking was Cheka boss Felix Dzerzhinsky.

“Of course it is. Anyway, Tukhachevsky, for once, has everything in hand out there. That’s why we scheduled this. So brief me.”

“If we are to make this NEP thing work we have to be able to purchase, in sequence, those things we need most for the key industries. If we say war industries are of first importance than we need to build up our iron and coal mining, steel manufacturing, machine tool construction, and finally the military and ordnance factory machinery itself.

“If we could buy this stuff from the advanced, needless to say capitalist, countries that would be one thing. Assuming we could get credit from capitalist banks as any other sovereign government can. However, none of that applies to us. We are anathema to the capitalists – they will sell to us only for cash up front.

“Assuming we can’t engage in normal international economics we have no choice but to steal what we need.”

“I know. I agree.”

“I can do this through the Foreign Economic Intelligence Directorate as you know.”

“You already are Felix.”

“Koba look at the TO & E we have created to do just this one task of modernizing our war industries. This is the only copy and it is for you.”

“So what is your point? It’s going to be expensive?”

“Yes. Very expensive and you are the only one who can assure us we will get the support we need. Neither I nor my staff want to initiate a program such as this which will absorb so much of our ready foreign reserve cash for many years, if it is going to be subject to reversal for some internal Byzantine reasons known best to the Politburo.”

“Let me study the specifics. I’ll get back to you on those. However, as long as I am in charge of these matters you can be assured that only the Red Army will have a higher priority and perhaps not even them. Felix I know what we have to do. If you had not made specific proposals along these industrial espionage lines for long term work I would have done so. Let me suggest we ask Lev (Feldbin; Alexander Orlov) to draft his ideas on a long term program and recruitment of the intellectual workers who will be employed in key capitalist industries.

“You prefer him over Menzhinsky:”

“No, not really. Mezh is as loyal a comrade as there is. But Lev is a genius. He was smart enough to see through his father’s Zionism and find Marx and then Lenin and finally us. His work in the North, then in the Polish campaign and finally in liquidating our enemies in the Caucuses, was superb. Now, we might see what insight he has, given his cosmopolitanism, with regard to work in Milano, Torino, Berlin and London. Now, if there is nothing else…

“Thank you Koba for your time and your support.”

“Unto death do us part Comrade.”

Foreign Policy Consequences

In 1922, on the 16th of April, Lenin’s diplomats, led by the aristocrat Bulgarian Trotskyist, Christian Rakovsky, negotiated the Rapallo Pact (Rapallo is a small seaside town just to the south of Genoa, on the Italian Riviera) with the new German Capitalist government of the Weimar Republic. It was the cornerstone of the new Leninist foreign policy up and until the Second World War which began for the USSR on June 22, of 1941. All in all, Lenin’s peacetime foreign policy doctrine (keeping the imperialist encirclement divided) lasted nearly twenty years. In new form, it continued as the wartime policy of Stalin as the Alliance of the USSR and the English-speaking World.

The Rapallo treaty had key public features including (1) the mutual recognition of each of the signatories as the legitimate governments of Germany and Russia. Thus, Germany became the first capitalist country to formally recognize the Bolshevik Regime. (2) The Bolshevik government renounced all reparations (payments for damages caused by the World War) from Germany that Russia was due under the Versailles Treaty. An extensive (3) “most favored nation” trade agreement was worked out between the two. Most importantly, perhaps, was (4) the "secret protocol" that allowed the Wermacht (German Army) to train its troops on Soviet soil, with whatever weapons they liked. Since the Versailles Treaty banned many things to the German Army this was of critical importance. Also, (5) secretly, the Germans agreed to continue what they had already been doing, which was building arms factories in Russia for the Red Army. Cash was king and the Bolsheviks, in power, had plenty of that. The Wermacht had accordingly responded, thus the military factory construction organized by Leon Trotsky.

As a matter of interest, it was in the Soviet Union that German Army officers, training under the provisions of the secret protocol of the Rapallo Treaty, would learn their soon-to-be famous “blitzkrieg” parachutist and armor tactics from Red Army General Tukhachevsky.

In the 1920’s and 1930’s the USSR would have the most advanced military forces in both equipment and doctrine in the world. Including the pioneering of “Deep Operations” theory (in the 1936 Field Manual for the Red Army it is synonymously referred to as Deep Battle) which featured advanced ground attack aircraft and heavy tanks moving in squares and probing deep along openings in an enemy’s front, with the idea of preparing the way for a “permanent offensive” to exploit the collapsing enemy rear, preventing him from redeploying his forces in any planned fashion.

So, the Red Army went over to the defensive posture of guarding Soviet frontiers and preparing for the next imperialist onslaught. But the Comintern did not. The Comintern went onto the offensive!

In Requiem

“The defensive period of the worldwide war with imperialism was over, and we could, and had the obligation to, exploit the military situation to launch an offensive war.” So, Lenin summed up the logic underlying the original decision to test Europe with the Polish campaign, in his September 20th, 1920, Political Report to the Central Committee of the Russian Party’s 9th All-Russian Conference. - And without much further ado Lenin accepted the responsibility for, and the results of, the disastrous campaign into Europe. But the defensive wars against imperialism were over for the moment and the BolshevikRepublic standing alone, albeit unrecognized by the great capitalist powers, was at least not under attack. (For more of Lenin on this I recommend The Unknown Lenin, 1996, Richard Pipes, Yale University Press.)

Lenin Parting Ways with Trotsky –  March 1920 to March 1921

Between the 9th and 10th Party Congresses

The split between Trotsky and Lenin in 1920 over (1) “labor armies”, at the 9th Party Congress and the “militarization of the proletariat” debate of the spring, was now exceedingly exacerbated because of (2) the summer failure in Poland. It would deepen in a few more days when (3) Lenin took on Trotsky over the Trade Union question almost as if he were an enemy.

On December 30, 1920, Lenin kicked off the attack on Trotsky and his Trade Union thesis with a 27 page explanation of Trotsky’s mistakes in a paper by the same name:  The Trade Unions, the Present Situation, and Trotsky’s Mistakes.” It began:

“My principle material is Comrade Trotsky’s pamphlet, The Role and Tasks of the Trade Unions. When I compare it with the theses he submitted to the Central Committee and go over it very carefully, I am amazed at the number of theoretical mistakes and glaring blunders it contains. How could anyone starting a big Party discussion on these questions produce such a sorry excuse for a careful thought out statement? Let me go over the main points which, I think, contain the original fundamental theoretical errors” (Lenin 1920 page 2 as above.)

This is one of the most important of Lenin’s papers of that time and you should study it closely to see the arguments and problems of the time and how Lenin stands heads and shoulders above the others. One might say an intellectual giant among intellectual pygmies. By seeing how the Party was confused and misled so often around the complex issues of production (parity, priority, coalescence, etc.)

Note how Lenin speaks to them as a professor speaks to students. – And, they accept that precisely because that is exactly the relationship Lenin has come to have with his followers. Most importantly see how the problems confronting the Bolsheviks now in production were simply those they inherited when they failed to inherit a fully developed capitalist stage economy. Just the opposite. The most primitive capitalist stage economy imaginable in a country moving ahead and so primitive as to be far from prepared to build socialism without the estafette of Bolshevik governmental and state power.

One, two, three, great Party divides between Lenin and Trotsky occurred during that fateful twelve months from March 1920 to March of 1921. By the end of 1920 Lenin had had his fill of Trotsky. By the beginning of 1921 Trotsky and Lenin were on different pages.

Trotskyism vs. Leninism

Permanent Revolution or PermanentState and Government

Trotsky’s initial claim to fame came from his development of the thesis first presented by George Plekhanov. Namely, the concept that the Russian bourgeoisie was too economically and politically weak to fully complete the bourgeois (capitalist stage) revolution. Trotsky’s development of this thesis was that the working class led by its revolutionary Party would help the bourgeoisie complete their revolution against autocracy and for parliamentary democracy – but – in the process would itself take the lead and turn the capitalist revolution into a proletarian revolution non-stop. He called this the thesis of Permanent Revolution.

Lenin’s reaction to this thesis was one of relative indifference. In other words, he thought this may well be true with regard to the weakness of the Russian bourgeoisie. However, the central point is our policy must always lead the workers toward proletarian dictatorship regardless of the condition of the bourgeoisie. In other words, Lenin saw Trotsky’s thesis as essentially true, but merely true. Irrelevant and immaterial.

By 1921 Trotsky’s thesis had undergone much transformation and Trotsky himself engaged in much gratuitous rewriting of history to explain his pe-1917 history of anti-Bolshevism. But, the central change in Lenin’s thinking was his understanding that what Bolshevism now confronted was the need for a relatively permanent state apparatus. In other words a “permanent” coercive State to hold power against our class enemies and a “permanent” Government to oversee construction of the essential industrial base they should have inherited from the capitalist stage but did not. By “permanent” Lenin meant several decades at least. What Lenin wants, and says again and again very clearly, is a Party devoted to the practical side of building a new economy NOT a lot of bullshit intellectualizing.

Statistics on proposals and decrees are what are needed not poorly thought out intellectualizing about Soviet Trade Unions. Real analysis of real reports on real production matters. Read Lenin’s paper on The Trade Unions and Trotsky’s Mistakes (above.)

So, in short, the idea that Bolshevism could advance worldwide by relying on pressing the bourgeoisie hard everywhere and breaking through here and there via proletarian insurrection – i.e., Permanent Revolution – was now distinctly at odds with the 1921 Leninist position that the Party’s primary task was to consolidate state and governmental power and get on with the process of industrialization which was essential to build socialism anywhere – i.e., the Permanent Bolshevik State and Government.

To paraphrase and sum up, Lenin says,

“…this understanding is the only theoretical justification for leaving “war communism” for NEP. The practical reason – our survival – is another reason altogether. Now we have to make NEP work or we have only been deluding ourselves about being able to build what we should have inherited. Although, because we have survived we may yet get the chance to succeed globally, even if we fail in industrial construction.”

How to Do It? Incentives and Mass Mobilization

Despite a century to come of ultra-left proclamations about “moral incentives” to increase production, as in extreme examples in power, from Trotsky to Madame Mao (Jiang Qing) and Pol Pot, we know how those would have come out or in actuality, as in China and Cambodia, did turn out, after achieving what their bosses considered to be full state and governmental power. - And when commensurate steps in industrialization were not synchronized in a Stalinist way right alongside moral incentives. This despite the fact, it was always a fundamental Marxist “given” that WE HAVE TO HAVE THE FULLY DEVELOPED INDUSTRIAL BASE OF CAPITALISM BEFORE IT BECOMES POSSIBLE TO BUILD REAL SOCIALISM LET ALONE COMMUNISM. Nothing could change that scientific fact and the Bolshevik leaders were real Marxists – i.e., real social scientists. Eventually, the cold and clearly logical Bolshevik leaders of the 1920’s had to win out over their more romantic colleagues, if for no other reason than because the Stalinists (and Latter Day Chinese equivalents, beginning with Deng Xiaoping in 1975) had the only sure way of handling the ongoing economic crises.

In other words, in the last analysis the “successful” Bolshevik bosses were never bourgeois intellectual adventurers ready to roll the dice on untested and theoretically wrong and unsound ultra-left prejudice. Building the capitalist infrastructure they should have inherited, required a variety of moral and material incentives or simple force. – And, they knew it. Most importantly they were willing to act accordingly.

At the same time these and all subsequent Bolshevik bosses recognized, and have always recognized, the need to campaign incessantly throughout society in favor of moral incentives, the “socialist ideal”, the finest behavior on the part of individuals toward society and the expectation of nothing more in return. Since huge quantities of labor were not materially rewarded in any way acceptable to most workers in the capitalist world, in terms of hours, wages and working conditions, how could it have been otherwise?

– And, comrades, let me remind you, this is why we are here. That is, we are here to break the logjams and negotiate the bottle-necks the masses encounter in the process of making history. We are here, in other words, to accelerate the process of transition to truly human society via the stage of communism. (- And, in the process of doing this, we save humanity from its otherwise inevitable self-destruction under an unguided, stochastic, capitalist mode of production.)

Lenin Defeats Trotsky

March 8 - 16, 1921 (10th Party Congress)

Two months later at the 10th Party Congress in March of 1921 Lenin was openly extremely angry with Trotsky which he need not have been if merely for effect. Because as Lenin well aware his side would win, if for no other reason than that Koba was handling the entire Congress and the “counting room.” Not that he would need that. Lenin well knew he had a “god-like” role with the Party and ultimately the Party would always do what he wanted them to do. So, in the voting the Leninists won out decisively over Trotsky and his group.

The central topic of the fight was the very number one question confronting the SovietRepublic, namely how to organize production. What is the role of the Government and what should be the role of labor? This is an academic question now and requires a great deal of space to deal with historically so we shall move on.

Except to say Lenin having gained a decisive victory over Trotsky said “We will come to terms with Trotsky.” – And he did, removing Trotskyist opponents at every level and rewarding his supporters with their jobs, in a way often referred to in North America as the “spoils system.” In other words, the Leninists cleaned house. They changed the rules, and now banned factionalism and debate except for a few weeks before Party Congresses and Conferences.

Then they formalized the organizational reorganization of the Party from the top down when they brought Molotov onto the Politburo and removed Krestinsky. Krestinsky had taken Trotsky’s side at the Congress and was Trotsky’s top man organizationally as a main party secretary. As I say replacing him was Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s top organizer and main party secretary.

Zinoviev had his status again re-upped to full member *. Across the board secretaries supporting Trotsky were replaced by those supporting Lenin. In addition to Krestinsky out went Preobrazhensky and Serebryakov, the other two main party secretaries with loyalty to Trotsky. Coming in to replace them in addition to Molotov were the Leninist secretaries Kaganovich, Uglanov and Yaroslavsky. In military matters Frunze came in as the top Leninist Party General taking charge of the Red Army for all practical purposes, where he had been Chief of Staff for years anyway. Chief instrument in this Leninist reorganization was – you guessed it – Joseph Stalin, who had, of course, provided all the extra votes the Leninists could ever have desired at the 10th Party Congress a few days earlier.

*****

[* Zinoviev had been in the doghouse since he and Kamenev had betrayed the Party and the Revolution on the eve of the Revolution by going to the capitalist press and exposing the details of the Bolshevik plot to overthrow the Capitalist Provisional Regime. At first expelled, than forgiven by Lenin and readmitted, then kept at arm’s length while at Politburo meetings by the technical denial of their voting rights (e.g., candidate members sitting in). Although, as far as I can tell from the voting records, by 1921 when Zinoviev was restored to full membership status he had been voting all along anyway.

Stalin, on the other hand, had a longer memory and a personal philosophy so that in 1935 when both Zinoviev and Kamenev would confront the Party once again, the outcome in 1936 would be their death. That personal philosophy of Joseph Stalin’s I think might best be represented by the organization he created within the Cheka called SMERSH (Smyert Spyonum – i.e., Death to Spies.)] In charge of SMERSH was Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s long time comrade from the early days of struggle in the Russian Trans-caucuses and in Georgia. (Beria had written a book entitled Comrade Stalin and the Struggle in the Trans-caucuses).]

Stalin almost offhand inherits the Leadership

A Most Non-spectacular Transfer of Power

This Congress featured the de facto formalization of Stalin’s role as Lenin’s top man and accordingly, as the next fourteen months prior to Lenin’s disabling stroke played out, as his successor. – And, Lenin’s principal enemy in this fight had been Leon Trotsky so it was not surprising to anyone at any level in the Party when Stalin and Trotsky emerged as leading protagonists at the beginning of Lenin’s twenty one month long illness (May 25, 1922 – January 21, 1924). Lenin himself would acknowledge Stalin’s principal role in his communications in the years preceding his May 25th, 1922 stroke. – And, in his final letter to the Party, (delivered at the end of January, 1924) Lenin acknowledged Stalin as the chief competitor with Trotsky for the succession, even if he didn’t fully realize that this would be the main interpretation given his Letter.

When Lenin had his first stroke, as I say a little over a year after this Congress, it was this Leninist Government and Party Leadership that was in place. It was this Government and State in place, and it had been Joseph Stalin putting it in place, from the beginning (organizing the delegates and the voting) through the implementation, of Lenin’s 1921 program (wholesale replacement of Krestinsky’s bureaucracy with Molotov’s.)

Furthermore the Party had been extremely happy with the peaceful and orderly 11th (1922) Congress which turned out to be the first of a long series of unified Congresses, as Lenin wished. (It concluded only weeks before Lenin’s first stroke on May 25th). Lenin said exactly this to Michael Borodin only days after this 1922 11th Congress (see Inside Snapshot in Ch. 14 below) and only days before his first stroke.

Stalin got the credit, for the extremely orderly 11th Congress. - And the Party got the credit for what appeared to be a coming, first good harvest since the beginning of the World War.  This was the beginning of a long series of unified Congresses which again and again would support the unified Party line being presented by Lenin, the Boss (and his successor Stalin).

However, if something unexpected were to happen, and Lenin would no longer be there and in charge, remember, in 1921 the “Old Boss” had been de facto replaced by the

”New Boss”, except that nobody knew it. That is to say, since Lenin at 51 years of age was a very young man (to be a national leader), and appeared perfectly ready to carry on, at least until his first disabling stroke, the significance of this de facto inheritance could not have been immediately apparent to anyone for another full year. – And, in fact, not until a few weeks after the 1lth Congress (1922) would it become apparent that Stalin had emerged as the Number One national leader of the Soviet Republic (soon to be the USSR.) Even then Stalin’s initial appearance was as an unimpressive number one.   Why?

For one thing, because his status seemed to depend on the “trinity” arrangement within the Politburo of Kamenev, Zinoviev and Stalin. However, in reality, all of this formal alliance business between these three was important only in the minds of Kamenev and Zinoviev. Both Kamenev and especially Zinoviev, were lazy and always had been. They were more than content to lay back and let Stalin do all the work – all they had to do was to vote the right way at Politburo and Central Committee meetings.

For another thing Stalin had so many titles, which to the rest of the world were all rather mystifying. For example what was a “General Secretary”, or for that matter what was a “Commissar of the Workers and Farmers Inspection”, or a “Commissar of Nationalities”? What did being a “One of the three Army Triumvirs” mean and the whispered “Chief of all Secret Departments” (the Russian Party and the Comintern for example) imply? Not to mention a multitude of jobs and assignments for which the press reported he bore primary responsibility. So, as Stalin gradually emerged over the next five years, as the top Soviet leader, equivalent to President’s and King’s, the matter was very anticlimactic.

Unimpressive though the succession had been, the truth is simply that after the 10th Congress (1921) Stalin, who had assumed or been given responsibility for just about everything, outworked, and therefore outfought, all potential opponents prior to Lenin’s death. He was, by March of 1921, de facto in charge of both the Red federal Government and the Red federal State. The great crises confronting the Soviet Union would, for better or for worse, be in his hands, primarily, for the next thirty plus years (1921 – 1953).

The Kronstadt Naval Mutiny

March 16, 1921

Trotsky Saves His Own Ass by the Skin of his Teeth

Immediately as the 10th Congress concluded, the sailors of the Kronstadt Naval Garrison (that guarded the entrance to Petrograd) mutinied. It was nominally an ultra-left revolt featuring the usual motley crew of agrarian anarchists and urban syndicalists now unhappy over the Bolshevik’s failure to leave War Communism behind.   The farmers wanted the restoration of the private market in agriculture and were revolting here there and everywhere, rather spontaneously, and the ultra-left cabal at Kronstadt was taking advantage of the general unhappiness of all the sailors and marines of farmer origin, who got the brunt of the negative communications from the countryside. – And, there was a swarm of foreign agents sent from capitalist state apparatuses throughout Europe and North America, but fortunately the Cheka had a grip on most of this.

Leading the fight against the armed Kronstadt rebellion itself, came the War Commissar Leon Trotsky, grabbing the microphone at the podium, at the very end of the 10th Congress. Remember this is the Congress that had removed him and his entire team and was in a bloody mood as far as he and they were concerned.

Trotsky cleverly demands that all the delegates get up immediately and report for armed combat duty alongside Red Army elite storm units, now lining up to cross the ice, and take on the rebels hand-to-hand. – And, so they did. Many of Trotsky’s enemies died in the bloody frontal assault on Krondstadt. Those that didn’t die were now too burned-out to carry a hard-on for the man who had infuriated them so much only days before. The Congress had concluded.

– And, as matter of historical note, the rebels were liquidated and Trotsky had once again pulled a rabbit-out-of-the-hat at the last minute. In doing so he gained a respite from the seemingly unstoppable tidal wave of opposition heading his way, led by the chief (Lenin) himself, if only temporarily

Inside Snapshot

April 23, 1921

Lenin and Krupskaya on Stalin

“Illych, I need a few minutes of your time if you’re up to it.”

“Of course,”

“It’s about Stalin. You asked me to work with him preparing for the Congress. I did and learned a lot. I have been talking to him a lot ever since. At first because of the detailed organization of the Congress and then we just started talking about many things. What I am concerned about, if that is the right word, perhaps I should say what I think you should be aware of, is Stalin as a person.

“Let me say I like Koba very much. He is about the most wonderful, true, authentic Russian revolutionary I ever met – or more importantly than I ever idealized. But…”

Krupskaya stopped in order to start over again.

“He has tremendous ability Illych, and a much broader scope of knowledge than anyone seems to be aware of. He is not the dullard Trotsky keeps painting him as. He’s not a workhorse or a burro – although he outworks everyone and apparently has been from the beginning back in 1901. For example, he knows Marxism, Illych. Better than I do. Do you know he reads one new book every day?

“I guess more importantly is (1) do you realize that he has complete authority over the police – uniformed and secret. You know, because you appointed him, (2) he runs all the intelligence operations, not only for the Russian Party but for the Comintern, but do you realize this has given him (3) de facto authority over all of our foreign operations? Do you realize (4) the Army commanders are personally loyal to him? (5) Do you understand that he is in total charge of all the nationalities? I mean in practice not just as Commissar for Nationalities. (6) Did you know that all the Government chiefs go to him for whatever they need? (7) Did you know he works 19 hours a day every day of the year? Finally, (8) do you realize he runs the entire Party apparatus from the top down in every village, every town and every city?

“I’m not saying all this is bad. Perhaps we are lucky. Koba loves you personally and is totally loyal to you and to Bolshevism so everything he does is put at our service. But, in terms of the future, he is the one who is going to be the next Party leader – in his case his leadership won’t be like yours – he is “the Boss” in reality and he acts that way in practice. I mean they call you the Boss, and the Old Man, out of deeply felt respect but in his case he is the Boss! I hate to say it, but he is the Boss, like dime novels tells us a mafia boss is the chief of whatever they do.

“What I am saying is I think you need to start paying a lot more attention to him as a person. Why? Because he respects you so much you can shape him the way you like if you just spend time with him. If he does take over in the future this would be extremely important.”

“I see. Yes I know Koba is loyal and extremely valuable. He is without doubt our most capable and politically correct Politburo leader and I should spend more time with him just to know what the hell is going on. I will spend more time with him.”

“Every day Illych.”

“Alright. – And no I didn’t realize he had accumulated that much power and responsibility although now that you bring it to my attention I guess I should have known. Perhaps we should formalize his role in some way rather than just keep piling new responsibilities on his shoulders with the concomitant titles.

“Nadia the thing that has bothered me about Koba for some time is he never seemed happy. Only twice have I seen him happy. The first time was when he lived with me in London in ‘07’ at that miserable Congress. Then, now, after he got married to that wonderful young woman. I think I let that mislead me. Those two are so devoted to each other I thought I could see that hard kind of gangster personality change.”

“She has done a wonderful job with him I completely concur. You know better than I about his past but I am afraid that all this has done is to make his Bossiness less objectionable to many of our comrades. Not that he hasn’t internalized her humanity but I think the only thing that will really put him on the right track is you.”

 “Do me a favor and invite those two to dinner tonight. Every day from now on I will start finding some excuse to meet and talk with him. Let’s see what happens.”

Strategic Magnitudes in Class Struggle

As you can see from Lenin’s perspective as chief of the Revolutionary Republic, no longer under attack at the end of 1920, it seemed that the previous three years of civil war had seen this defensive period go over to an offensive period of global class war, and now, in 1920, the world-wide struggle against Capitalism was falling back into a defensive mode once again.

From our Olympian perspective, which is to say all of prehistory and history viewed as a continuum, the mere existence of the SovietRepublic was an offensive move on the world stage. The defensive war within the Republic for its survival was also in fact an offensive action in the world history of class struggle. For the first time in 6000 years, since society first divided into classes, those in servitude had risen, taken power, and had at their head individuals who knew the laws of history, therefore, where they were going, and even maybe how to get there.

A lesson here is that there are simultaneously, two levels of magnitude to strategic planning. One on the historical (Olympian) level and the other on the specific momentary regional, national and international level; one global and another more restricted geographically.

Bolshevism’s Global Class Struggle Offensive Switches to the Comintern

Lenin created the Comintern in March of 1919; by 1920 new Parties of the labor movement were being formed all over the world. The Comintern or Communist International or Third International, replaced the Second International of Traitors and Renegades that had participated in the First World War. – And, it was a damned good thing Lenin acted when he did, for the subsequent failure to liberate Europe, via the Red Army offensive in Poland in the summer of 1920, had left the global strategic advance of World Socialism in limbo.

The new Third International had immediately set about building a world revolutionary Marxist alternative in the Leninist mode to throw off the yoke of capital, and, even though the revolution had temporarily failed in Europe, there was the other side of the SovietRepublic to think about. Thus, the attention of the Bolshevik leaders focused on China.

In the meantime, the Bolsheviks wrapped up their illegal counter-revolutionary opposition at home in a rather clever way. I often refer to it as the MOCR Roach Motel solution; we shall return to this subject again below.

Simultaneously…

Dancing with the Stars

Cover for the Heavy Lifting

The Soviet Commissariat for Foreign Affairs was ordered into action with regard to Great Britain in early 1920. Lenin sent his old “action” mentor, Leonid Krassin, to London to take charge of the effort there to secure British recognition for the Soviet Regime and initiate discussions with the Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s Government and its foreign minister Lord Curzon. Curzon so disliked the Bolsheviks, and especially Krassin (who he now knew had been the chief bank robber and organizer of a multitude of financial shenanigans supporting Lenin’s Bolsheviks), he refused to shake hands with him until admonished by his Prime Minister.

In March, 1922, Lenin, sent Krassin along with other Old Bolsheviks under the leadership of Chicherin and Radek and a team of new intellectual agents on the most important diplomatic mission so far in Bolshevik history!  (This is the same Radek who participated in the Bukharin advisory team sent to Liebknecht and Luxembourg to guide the German Revolution in January 1919, that fucked that thing up altogether). Included in this team of new intellectual agents were Joffe, Rakovsky, and the always reliable Maxim Litvinov. The Leninist diplomatic team went first to Berlin and then on to Genoa to take up the British and French offers to negotiate the Czarist debt and future economic relations.

We have seen how Rakovsky brilliantly maneuvered the two capitalist victors against each other coming up with the German-Soviet Alliance known to history as the Rapallo Pact. (Rapallo is a suburb of Genoa.)

This was the beginning of an effort to (1) get what we could out of the capitalists by negotiating cleverly to exploit the differences between the victorious Allies (England and France), and between them and the German capitalists. But commerce and trade were really just the excuse for entering into negotiations. What was the real reason in our eyes?

Everyone on our side knew the capitalists would never agree to normalize economic relations with the SovietRepublic. Rakovsky wrote extensively about this fact and the Bolshevik refusal to do any of the things being demanded of them. Yet certain distinct advantages could be gained for the Soviet Republic if diplomatic relations could be normalized and whatever trade was allowed by the imperialists that could be useful to us would also be helpful.

But, most importantly, the second (and number 2) reason and by far the most important reason, was that to make NEP work the Bolsheviks knew they would have to engage in massive international industrial espionage to defeat the boycott of Socialist development as proposed only months earlier by Lord Curzon at Locarno. Naturally, we Bolsheviks wanted to mislead the enemy governments about this. Thus, strong sustained efforts in the diplomatic arena over a substantial period should be made in order to provide cover for the real heavy lifting being done by the Cheka’s Economic Directorate.

 Let us be clear about this. We were more than happy to engage in normal commercial relations with capitalists in any capitalist country. But the Brits and the French led an absolute cabal of evil against letting us engage in any kind of normal trade. Nothing like the availability of gringo capital to the PRC some fifty odd years later existed in any way as the decade of the 1920’s opened. The door to normal commercial relations would remain forever closed to us as World War II approached.

We would not let foreign capitalists strangle us any more than we let local scumbag human garbage strangle us inside the SovietRepublic. There was no difference of view among Bolsheviks about this, although only a handful knew the full extent of our industrial espionage activities.

Rakovsky wrote extensively about the economic and political relationship between Soviet Russia and the capitalists of West Europe. For example, just before the Chicherin team left for Berlin and Genoa in March 1922 he wrote:  “Our whole problem is to hold out, not to count on a loan, on credits that might come after the Genoa conference. We must not forget we are still passing through a revolutionary epoch; we must look to ourselves for remedies to our own ills; we ourselves must fight the famine and the breakdown of our transportation system; and we must make the Red Army even stronger, because this is our only support.” (Emphasis added – Ed.)

The Chicherin team picked up on the negotiations with the German PM and Foreign Minister of the previous month (also conducted by Rakovsky) in Berlin and then boarded the train for Genoa. The stop in Berlin had been to put the final touches onto a secret treaty being prepared by Rakovsky and the Germans which would make de facto allies out of Germany and Russia in the event neither could get what they wanted from the World War (I) victorious Brits and French at Genoa.

Rakovsky wrote this summary of what they were heading into and what the Bolsheviks should expect from the capitalists at Genoa:

“They will present us with outrageous demands. We shall naturally be unable to accept these demands because in their basic conception they defy the revolutionary masses of the SovietRepublic. We shall sign no commitments that would violate the basic laws of the SovietRepublic, the laws nationalizing the land and giving the state monopoly of industry and foreign trade.” On the other hand, “There is no doubt that they do not all think alike. Conditions differ: some are anxious to start trade with us immediately, others are more interested in various reparations.”

The Dancers

When Trotsky came on board with the Bolsheviks in June of 1917 he brought with him a small but highly intelligent crew. This included, for example, the Austrian psychiatrist Adolph A. Joffe and the bourgeoisiefied Bulgarian aristocrat Christian Rakovsky. These were not men who could organize clandestine armed strikes or rob banks and stage coaches. But there were things they could do that would be extremely important once the Bolsheviks seized state power which was now only some three months away.

Also coming on board after Lenin’s return were other ultra-left intellectuals including George Uritsky and George Chicherin both of whom arrived soon after the February revolution from Sweden and London respectively. Many of them including these two had been friendly to the Bolsheviks. After Lenin decided to try and bring competitors on board to form a bigger and stronger bloc – especially in the Petrograd City Council – they joined up and soon had important jobs to carry out for the Leninists.

Leonid Krassin and Victor Kurnatovsky were Bolsheviks, on the other hand, who could both rob capitalist banks and dance at bourgeois balls. Krassin was perhaps the best Bolshevik ever at having a foot in both camps and keeping all ships heading in the right direction. I think it is safe to say Krassin was the biggest bank robber in Russian history! A kind of Jesse James and John Dillinger combined!

Lenin gave Krassin command of the new crew of Trotsky originating intellectual Bolsheviks. – And, Chicherin emerged as the top diplomat.

Lenin gave Stalin responsibility for Nationalities because (a) Stalin was a Georgian and (b) he had written (with Lenin’s assistance) the Party’s only theoretical work on the problem of the multitude of nationalities existing in the Czarist Empire. Accordingly, Lenin also gave Stalin the organizational responsibility for giving the newly liberated peoples and nations within the Empire their own political leadership and armed forces to back-up that leadership.

In the Ukraine (see the Dec. 20, Politburo meeting above) Stalin conducted the negotiations with the Rada (first Ukrainian national government) and prepared the way for Red Army intervention that put the incoming Rakovsky on the throne so to speak of the new Ukrainian Red government. However, Rakovsky and his ability were soon needed in the Foreign Commissariat so Rakovsky went from being Red Boss of the Ukraine to being the top Red Diplomat in all of Western Europe.

Abandoning Trotsky

After Lenin decidedly defeated Trotsky at the 10th Party Congress in 1921 the new crew of formerly Trotskyist intellectuals defected. Latter Day Trotskyists would try and spin the relationship between these men and Stalin as the years progressed but the simple historical truth is they abandoned Trotsky after 1921 and threw their lives into the service of what the Leninists wanted in the way of socialism in the Soviet Republic (and after 1924, the Soviet Union). By the time Rakovsky got back to Russia permanently in 1927 Trotsky had long since lost both his position in the Party hierarchy and the respect he had had before his defeat at Warsaw in August 1920. In fact Trotsky was on his way out of the Bolshevik Party (expelled) altogether in 1927.

The point is when Trotsky lost out against Lenin (and his successor Stalin) at the 10th Party Congress he lost the loyalty and support of all those he had brought with him originally. Oh, some may have been sympathetic to Trotsky’s side of things here and there but when it came to Lenin and Stalin on the one hand or Trotsky on the other they inevitably opted to go with the former. At least in the early post-Lenin years if not through all of them.

- And, it wasn’t just Rakovsky. Joffe agreed to go to China for Lenin after the defeat of the Trotskyists at the 10th Party Congress, the orderly 11th Party Congress, and Lenin’s first stroke.

The Springtime Dance

The Genoa Quadrille

Rakovsky described his April 1922 dance of the diplomats at Genoa to be a kind of “quadrille.” He organized daily press conferences at the rather friendly environment of the University of Genoa where he exposed the various capitalist plots against the SovietRepublic as they unfolded day by day. The always enraged London Times complained daily about the Bolshevik propaganda successes in Italy.

But the real aim of the Bolshevik civil program in West Europe was to divide the bondholding small bourgeoisie away from the Big capitalist regimes and their program of destroying Bolshevism altogether. Thus, Rakovsky encouraged small Russian bondholders and others who felt they were owed money by the Bolshevik government, to come and see him about it. They could work things out man to man. (Or woman to man, as in the case of a woman expatriate living in London, who called upon Rakovsky to pay her the rent for living three years in her Kharkov home while Red Boss of the Ukraine! Which he did.)

In England, France, and Italy, Rakovsky managed well in dividing claimants from their respective governments. This was very important because it prevented the numerically tiny big cap classes from allying with their far more numerous brethren in the small cap classes. For example, if England went to war with Russia the small bondholders would be SOL (shit out of luck) forever.

Furthermore, Rakovsky managed to turn not only Germany against the French-English combine at Genoa but, as time progressed, France against England. With all three major European cap countries at each other’s throats over Russian money and trade there was little likelihood of a united cap attack on Soviet Russia. At least for the moment.

Making NEP Work

March 1922

“So, Lev, brief us.”

“Koba, Vlad, Felix, and distinguished Comrades, what it comes down to is if we anticipate a long term cold war against the capitalist countries such as we are bogged down in now, then we have to develop a long term program of industrial espionage to make up for their boycott of socialist development.

“What does this mean in practice? Well to begin with we need to recruit our spies while they are still in college. While they are still learning the basics of the industrial engineering profession they will then sell on the capitalist market. If we can recruit them at the Italian, British and German universities then we can (1) prevent them from giving away their political sympathies in public and (2) direct their studies in such a way as to send them into a particular target profession such as chemical engineering, as opposed say to something else like civil engineering, and then into the recruiting direction for the industrial concerns they are to infiltrate.

“This means in practice we will need thousands of controlling agents living on a permanent assignee basis in places like Torino, Milano, Berlin, London, and so forth. They will in turn over the coming decade control over one hundred thousand other engineers and scientists directly or indirectly, according to the protocols established in Felix’s new Moscow Rules Handbook for Illegal Worker’s Agents.

“What we will get is up to-the-minute intelligence on the details of all important industrial projects going on in these countries.”

“What is this going to cost me?” Asked the Boss.

“Hold onto your seats. About two hundred million US dollars per year now and more as time proceeds.”

“Fuck me!”

“Koba, you and Comrade Dzerzhinsky, asked me to produce this plan because you know I will tell you the truth and what it will cost. This is the truth. If we have to make up for capitalist industrial advance technologically without normal trade opportunities then this is what it will cost us. But, we will have everything they have as fast as they have it.”

“I understand, Lev, Felix, the rest of you. I just was overcome momentarily by the cost. On the other hand if we had only NEP guidelines it would cost us just as much as trade overruns costs over the same time period. It just sounds like so much.”

“You know me Koba. I hate the costs as much as you do. But there is nothing to be gained by lying to ourselves about the extremely vulnerable position in which we find ourselves. You know as well as I that once the capitalists have a definitive technical advantage over us they will be back to give it another go. What choice do we have if we are to advance rather than surrender?

“I know. I can find the financial resources. But it won’t be easy.”

“About two thirds of these costs have to do with the duplication effort back here so I was thinking in terms of budgeting you should consider the possibility that these costs could be covered in total or in part by whatever funds you have already set aside under NEP for light and heavy industrial construction.”

“Yes, thank you. That will help a great deal but it’s still going to be tough.”

“I am glad this is your problem Koba and not mine. That’s why you’re the Boss.

Lenin’s Last Will and Testament

Right after Lenin’s victory at Rapallo and immediately after he met with Michael Borodin and General Blyukher (see Ch 14 below) about taking charge of the situation in China, in the spring of 1922 (April 30, 1922), he suffered the first of a series of disabling strokes (May 25, 1922). Lenin was so distressed by his paralysis, and depressed by his slow and never complete recovery; he initially asked his closest friend and associate within the Party – Joseph Stalin – to supply him secretly with poison.

Who else could he turn to? Stalin had supplied him with money for years, and hid him in Finland in the summer and autumn of 1917, and was well known to everyone within the leadership to be “Lenin’s Bodyguard.”

Thus, after Lenin’s first stroke, Stalin had been assigned by the Politburo to be sure Lenin got the best treatment available, and he (Stalin) was to report to them regularly about Lenin’s progress in recovery. He was the only person, other than Krupskaya, close to him at this point. The only one he felt he could ask because he did not want to tell his wife.

As I say, Lenin asked Stalin for poison. Stalin was so emotionally attached to Lenin, Stalin said he would rather kill himself than do this and asked the Politburo for guidance. This is the only time, of which I am aware, Stalin asked anyone in the Party for help and really meant it.

However that may have been, they instructed Stalin to talk Lenin out of suicide. Convince him he could recover and still lead, even if now he might need a larger and especially equipped semi-hospital room at the Kremlin. – And, most importantly, make Lenin realize he was still absolutely essential. Staying alive was a revolutionary act. “Explain to Illych that he owes it to us…” said Zinoviev.

Lenin never got the poison. But he never fully recovered either.

As his condition gradually improved in the latter part of 1922 he rapidly got back to work. But then after this December and January (1922-1923) burst of energy he had another stroke (March 7th, 1923) or more probably several strokes (March 10th 1923) . It was during this brief energetic time he had insisted on finishing the dictation for his Letter to the Congress (which is what the Testament is formally called).

At any rate, in February (1923) Lenin had been feeling better and getting feisty about the low-stress environment rules his doctors had prescribed and the Politburo enforced via Stalin. Lenin became angry over this perceived attempt to control his reentry into politics and began insisting on all kinds of reports being sent to him about virtually everything – including the most stressful issues confronting the Party at the moment – which included the Trans-Caucasian matter. This certainly made sense if the Chief was on his way back and getting reinvolved.

- And, Stalin complained to the Central Committee that his attempts to keep Lenin on an emotional even-keel had led to “Illych becoming angry with me over the smallest things. This would not have happened if I had not been straddled with this impossible mission. I insist you relieve me of this responsibility. Let him have whatever he likes. This has been going on for what nine months now and it is a constant struggle with a suicidal patient. Let the doctors handle him directly, if they can, and let him do as he likes. Let’s face it, when he feels well enough he wants to lead and he resents me trying to stop him and I can’t blame him. He’s going to get reinvolved when he feels up to it, and we just have to live with that. Let him have whatever he wants.”

- And, this is pretty much what happened with the Central Committee insisting Stalin stay on. If as nothing more than as a symbol of continuity in the relationship between Lenin and the rest of them.

Inevitably, Lenin did not get better. Probably he was continuing to die slowly of minor strokes before the massive stroke that killed him at the end of January 1924. From day one of these strokes he had less than two years to live.

These strokes appear to have been rather simple high blood pressure attacks for which no one then had any cure, except to get blood out of the circulation system. Usually this was done in those days with hypodermic needles that sucked up blood and removed it. Earlier versions had done the same thing (e.g., leaches).

Foreign doctors were called in to help the Bolshevik doctors but none of them could do anything other than suggest a multitude of ways to keep his blood pressure under control. Other than physical blood removal, most of this medical advice centered around keeping Lenin on an emotional even-keel. Given the condition of the Party and the Republic at that time (1922-24) this was a near impossibility. However, the Politburo insisted that “Happy Days are Here Again” measures for Lenin be rigorously followed in every way.

Stalin’s attempts at carrying out these physician’s and Politburo’s instructions further infuriated Lenin. In fact, they led directly to, and were specifically responsible for, the split between these two old and dear friends.

Stalin fought with Lenin’s wife about the importance of keeping Lenin calm and unaware of all the problems confronting the government. Stalin went so far as to have newspapers printed in one copy – for Lenin only – full of good news and whatever Stalin thought would keep Lenin calm and happy. – And, it did for quite a while. At least until the Boss found out.

In the end, Lenin had no illusions. He accepted the fact that the Party insisted he stay alive as long as possible but he never was very happy about it. He dictated then (December 1922 – January 1923), over a period of two weeks, his last will and testament.

Analyzing His Party

One by one Lenin reviewed six of the luminaries leading the Bolshevik Central Committee and/or Politburo. (At that moment on the seven man Politburo were in addition to Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and Pyatakov.)

Stalin he found to have become too rude and impolite and suggested some way be found of replacing Stalin with another comrade as General Secretary. A comrade who was more polite, congenial and indeed popular.

Trotsky he considered perhaps the most intellectually able of the Politburo but far too much of the bureaucrat for his liking, and he remarked on Trotsky’s legendary problem with arrogance, and remarked on his earlier anti-Bolshevism.

 – And, so on, he reviewed, one by one, six of his colleagues. When it was all said and done, none of those critiqued could have been very happy about it.

Although I think it may have been unintended, Lenin’s declaration at the beginning of his Letter to the Party Congress that Stalin and Trotsky were the principle Party leaders, turned out to have the most important effect.

As Lenin saw it, disunity among the Party leaders was the chief problem for the SovietRepublic, now confronting the global capitalist onslaught. It was then, achieving that “unity” (of the Party and its leadership) that was the most important critical task confronting the Party.

Specifically the first threat was the capitalist international threat (where Lenin points out that the stronger Socialism gets in the SovietRepublic the more intense will be the fury of, and thus danger from, our enemies).

The second greatest threat was the ongoing, seemingly internecine, conflict between the Party’s two top leaders: Trotsky and Stalin.

In effect, with this “Letter” Lenin probably sealed Trotsky’s fate. For as the coming year unfolded (after January 1924) Party cadre saw they had a choice. Get on board with Trotsky or with Stalin. In this game Stalin had all the incentives.

At any rate, Lenin gave this letter to Nadazhda Krupskaya (his wife and Central Committee member) to be read to the Party leadership once he passed away.

At my age (68) I have been through a few illnesses. I can almost feel Lenin’s pain as he writes his last will and testament. – And, he was cranky. Justifiably so. The entire exercise turned out to be less than fruitful – perhaps for this reason. However, that may have been, as soon as Lenin died on January 21, 1924, Krupskaya turned the letter over to the Politburo.

The letter was circulated to the entire Politburo. A meeting was called to decide what to do about leadership now that Lenin was gone and given the fact he had left a last political will and testament.

The Politburo concurred with what Zinoviev had had to say and that was “…that Lenin’s fears have proven groundless about Stalin.” Zinoviev said he and his colleagues knew this because they had been working on a daily and very friendly basis with Stalin since Lenin’s first stroke. The Politburo decided to ignore Lenin’s idea about replacing Stalin and moved on.

But that was not the end of it. The entire Party was informed of the letter and the Politburo’s subsequent decisions with regard to its highest other leaders at the upcoming (13th) Party Congress in 1924 (23 – 31 May, 1924), and it was very much on the agenda. But the Party was not about to rock the boat when everything was finally going so well.

Stalin gave the Main Report in place of Lenin at this 1924, 13th, Congress, as he had the year before at the 1923, 12th Party Congress (17 – 25 April, 1923), which began shortly after Lenin’s massive strokes of March 7th to the 10th (1923) (which dates Lenin’s last possibility to participate). Now, in 1924, every Congress participant must have sighed a concealed gasp of relief that the transition in government appeared to be going so well.

Under normal circumstances, perhaps that would have been the end of the entire matter. However, after Trotsky was expelled from the Party in 1927 he tried to make a big deal about Lenin’s last will and testament. Emphasizing Lenin’s idea of Stalin’s personality and the desirability of replacing him; never mentioning, of course, that Lenin found him (Trotsky) to be too bureaucratically inclined for his liking (and by implication too much of a bureaucrat to be the Party leader).

One might think it rather strange that Trotsky wanted it all ways. He wanted Stalin to be the champion of the bureaucrats (the opposite of how Lenin had analyzed his colleagues.) He wanted people to think his (Trotsky’s) intellectual superiority (which he said Lenin recognized in this last will) should have made him the leader. He wanted people to think Lenin’s Testament had been suppressed and if the Party had known of it things would have turned out differently.

As you have seen the Party had learned of the Testament immediately and discussed it thoroughly, from the Politburo down, prior to the 1924 Congress. How could it have been otherwise? After all, common sense tells us that with Lenin’s long and trusted, closest companion, and wife, Nadazhda Krupskaya, having provided the letter immediately to the Politburo, following Lenin’s January (1924) death, it could not have been otherwise.

Trotsky never had any chance of using the Army to back his ploy because the Army hated him. What had occurred was the logical transfer of power from Lenin, to one of his closest and original followers, who was also the man who had helped Lenin engineer the defeat of the Trotskyists in 1921 at the March Congress.

End of Story.

Lenin and Georgia

Toward the end of 1922 Lenin began to show remarkable signs of recovery. Apparently the low stress environment ordered by his medical team of world renowned physicians had worked. By the beginning of 1923 Lenin felt physically good for the first time in many months and he was more than ready (in his own mind) to reenter politics. Unfortunately, he jumped in with both feet, exactly against all the doctors’ orders. – And on March 7th 1923, he had another massive stroke which left him by the 10th, permanently without speech, and partially paralyzed. He had less than eleven months to live.

In the weeks when Lenin’s health had appeared to be on the rebound, and he had jumped into the politics of the moment, one of the first things he addressed was the completion of the plan to unify the various Bolshevik governments in the former Czarist Empire’s national groups into one unified Government. A Government recognizing the equality and autonomy of many of the nationalities previously suppressed by the Czarist regime.

Lenin and Stalin had been in agreement about how to proceed in this matter in the period preceding Lenin’s first stroke in the spring of 1922. This occurred in the midst of a great deal of internal Party debate about how to proceed with the former Czarist territories. One of the disputes was about how the Trans-CaucasianRepublics were to be incorporated. These three Republics were Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia.

In the end Stalin acceded to Lenin’s design where each of these Republics would be taken into the new Soviet Union as equal partners. Initially there had been a dispute because the first Party plan in Moscow was to have all three in one Trans-Caucasian Republic that would then be incorporated into the Russian Socialist Soviet Federation as opposed to being equal members in a Soviet Union with the RSSF, the Ukraine, and three others.

Stalin argued the case every way and then acceded to Lenin’s plan and discarded his own, as if nothing different than what he had initially proposed had in fact happened. – And, Stalin was right. Because, despite Lenin’s intricate reorganization of the Soviet Government on paper, the truth was simple. As long as the Party insisted on the monopoly of power over the Soviet Government, it now had, (which it did and had made a matter of Law), than the real center of power and decision making would always be in the Party structure that operated the command government and its economy.

For practical purposes, by the time of Lenin’s disabling illness, that meant the real center of power lay in the person (and concomitant personality) of Joseph V. Stalin.

On top of all of this argument about the shape of the future Soviet Union, Stalin’s long time bosom buddy from the years of organizing oilfield workers in Georgia (and  as the general in command of the Red Army forces liberating Georgia), Sergo Ordzhonikidze, had gotten into a fist fight with the leader of the opposing group of communists in Georgia (i.e., opposed to the idea of being subordinated first into a Trans-Caucasian federation and subordinated again in the proposed incorporation into the Russian Socialist Federation, as opposed to a Union of all independent Republics.) Lenin became upset about this fist fight as well as the way the entire Trans-Caucasian project had unfolded and he blamed Stalin whom he had made Commissar for Nationalities for not having prevented this.

However, until Stalin gave up his 19 hour a day, 365 day a year work schedule his decisions on these and all other matters would continue to prevail, if for no other reason than he was doing, or at least supervising, virtually all of the work of the Government. This is not to mention his supervision of the RedState (the Cheka and the Army); a rule to note in your study of Soviet history is that Stalin always persevered because he outworked everyone else.

Whatever might have happened had Lenin not had this final disabling March 7th, 1923, stroke we will never know. My own feeling is that the two (Lenin and Stalin) would have worked things out between them as they always had before. – And, because Stalin always capitulated to Lenin in the end.

Latter Day Trotskyists have for many decades made an issue out of Lenin’s activity in the few weeks he had of lucidity at the end of 1922 and the beginning of 1923. For whatever it’s worth I think this entire Trotskyist, after the fact, business to have been a lot of “playing politics” nonsense. The Earth belongs to the living and those of you with an interest may draw more profound conclusions once tackling the matter. I mention it here because the Georgian affair has been one of the arrows in the quiver of anti-communist Trotskyism. Therefore, you cadre need to know what was really going on. This is my take on the matter – make up your own minds.

The Death Watch Begins

Note on Lenin’s Illness after March 10, 1923

By Moshe Lewin

“The paralysis of the right side of the body and the loss of speech that occurred on March 10 (1923) seemed so alarming that the government decided to reveal the seriousness of the illness. From then on Izvestia published a daily health bulletin. On May 15, Lenin was moved from his apartment in the Kremlin to his country house at Gorki. Two months later, in July (1923), a miracle seemed to have occurred: Lenin’s health began to improve again. He began to take walks and to practice writing with his left hand. He was even able to visit the chairman of the local sovkhoz and spend three days with him.

“About August 10 (1923) he was allowed to write. He received Pravda every day and later Izvestia and other publications. Before long he was able to read books and had a reading list drawn up for him. It was usually Krupskaya who read him newspaper articles and perhaps passages from the books he asked for; he was far from completely cured. It was all the more astonishing that he managed to get permission for the journey he undertook on October 18 (1923). He traveled to Moscow, went to the Kremlin by car, and then set off again to wander the streets and to visit the Agricultural Exhibition. He then went back to his office, remained silent for a long time, took out some books from his library and returned to Gorki.

“Between November 24 and December 16, Bukharin, Preobrazhensky, Skvortsov-Stepanov, Krestinsky, Pyatnitsky and the editor of the Kasnaya Nov, Voronsky, came to see him. They talked to him about current affairs and brought news that Lenin listened to attentively, but he does not seem to have recovered the use of speech-the chronology contained in Volume XLV of the Sochineniya, (Collected Works – ed.) which mentions the loss of speech, does not return to the matter again.

“At the beginning of 1924, Lenin attended a Christmas party organized at the sovkhoz. On January 19, in a sledge, he followed a hunting expedition in the forest. But between January 17 and 20 his time was mainly taken up with reading the report of the Thirteenth Party Congress (sic). Lenin appeared very attentive and sometimes asked questions by gestures; certain points quite obviously irritated him, but Krupskaya managed to calm him, probably by inventing information for the purpose.

“On January 21, 1924, Lenin’s health suddenly deteriorated. He died at 6:50 p.m.”

[From Lenin’s Last Struggle, 1974, Moshe Lewin, Pantheon, New York, 193pp.]

Dead Man Lying

Lenin Finished in Politics May 25, 1922

Whether he was paralyzed in bed or dead in his Mausoleum Lenin was finished in politics the day of his first stroke May 25, 1922. After that he was never more than a living (and then dead) symbol. Whether it was the bullets fired into his brain by the Left SR crackpot (Fanya Kaplan) in 1918 that was the ultimate cause or simply inherited (or acquired) hypertension responsible we will never know. What we do know is that Lenin never played any role other than ceremonial (symbolic) after his first stroke.

If it had to happen it is a good thing it didn’t happen until the spring of 1922 because the Party was very confident by that time because of all the great things finally breaking for it. For example, the end of the civil war and the subsequent domestic conflict, the withdrawal of the last imperialist troops (Japanese), the treaty of Rapallo, the China strategy, the first good harvest, the preparation for unification of the Bolshevik Republics, etc.) and went on as if nothing untoward had happened.

The fuss instigated by Trotsky over what might have happened had Lenin not suddenly exited politics was and is irrelevant. – And, the Party should have been ready. It could not forever count on the one “superman” who had taken them and working people in general farther than anyone else in 6000 years. It was time to “grow up” and the Party proved that it had. For better or for worse the future of mankind was now in the hands of the Party Lenin created, built and had placed in power. But it would never again be in his personal hands.

The Right Way vs. the Wrong Way of Looking at things

Two Perspectives on Our Situation in 1924

Comrades, this is why we are here!

Much has been said over the last century about the primitive nature of the first country in which we first seized power. Often, this conversation takes the turn of implying that the entire thing was a mistake to begin with, since Russia had no chance of becoming the homeland of the World Socialist Stage, once supporting revolutions failed.

Let me remind you that this is exactly the kind of situation which justifies the existence of us communists! If history were to resolve everything itself in the proper way – from our perspective – then why would we need to intervene? Why would we be needed at all? The scientific insight and foresight of Marxism is not at all the same as Cromwellian “pre-destination” (where every step taken by every person is imagined to be pre-ordained or pre-destined by God), but it is predictive and powerful when, like any science, it is learned, understood and applied. It is our secret weapon.

In other words, we are not along for the ride – those of you who may be should find another line of work. Because once we get on to the killing all this sewing circle bullshit will be over. We communists intervene precisely because we understand the laws of history and therefore can speed up an otherwise interminably, and possibly fatally, slow adaptation of unguided unthinking humanity! A fictional analogy would be Hari Seldon and his science of psychohistory in the Foundation (Isaac Asimov) series of novels.

So, the fact that we did not have the ideal conditions for evolving by revolution from capitalism to communism (via an intermediary transition) is actually perfect! Perfect because we were needed, then and there, to get this process of transition from capitalism kicked in the ass and working! – And, to do so in one of the possible real world scenarios. That is what “free will” means in the real world.

Rule Number One: That kind of ass-kicking can only be done by an elite revolutionary leadership which has created its own (Leninist) Party, and is committed to mobilizing the mass of proletarians for revolutionary armed action against our class enemies and their dictatorship.

Rule Number Two: Remember, no matter what form their dictatorship takes – e.g., when it takes on bourgeois parliamentary democratic trappings - it is still nothing but a vicious dictatorship of an enemy social class that must be liquidated in its entirety, root and branch.

Our Situation in January 1924, When Lenin Died

Our biggest problems at the beginning of this year of 1924 were:

(1) The destruction of what had existed of a genuine industrial Russian proletariat. What hard times and war had not done to their numbers, had been done to workers by our leadership, as it called out workers again and again, to be the essential self-sacrificing shock troops in one or another critical battle, during the Civil War.

(2) Even our best most class conscious workers were often too uneducated to run the factories in which they worked. Needless to say,

(3) The would-be petty bourgeois capitalist farmers who were emerging from a domesticated feudal peasantry were useless to our immediate social needs. These primitive farmers were totally uneducated and 100% illiterate. They had been herded as a mass of domesticated farm animals for at least two hundred years, and were not capable of performing any function other than that of wooden plough semi-Neolithic farming – at least for the moment. Except to be soldiers. We could and did teach them to fight, and die, for our Revolution.

(4) As a consequence we had had to rely increasingly on a highly centralized body of elite Bolshevik commanders everywhere from the Army to industry.

(5) The old urban petty bourgeoisie recognized we were here to stay and decided that joining us was preferable to being killed by us. Besides it was the only way forward (upward) in the new social order. This was changing the nature of the Party itself as Old Bolsheviks were swamped by incoming new members; and,

(6)  There were only so many positions to be filled in both the Government and the Army and Navy. If bourgeois specialists of the Old Regime were needed and thus given some of these jobs that was that much less of the limited job pool available for loyal self-sacrificing Old Bolshevik cadre! The friction between the bourgeois specialists and the Party members thus institutionalized turned out to be one of the most difficult of the inherent problems confronting the Party as it struggled to create the capitalist infrastructure the Party had expected to inherit.

(7) The command nature of Party operations that began with the seizure could not now be changed since the Party was running everything in the country. How this might be democratized to encourage maximum participation of the working masses in the future was something,

 (7) As Lenin said, “we don’t know how to do.” (11th Party Congress, 1922)

*****

These are just a few of the conundrums that confronted us once we had seized power in such a primitive place. But, comrades, that’s what we are here for. Now, we must do our best to accelerate history along the lines we wish it to follow. Part of that is periodic theoretical review to see where we are and perhaps therefore where we may be going. Because we have literally the science of society and culture and their history, as our sole property, we have a great leg up to begin with. We know what we are doing and they do not, except in that limited “quarterly” perspective mentality they live by.

One main conclusion is that the intermediate transitional period between capitalism and communism, has featured, in real world practice, the emergence of an entirely new stage in the sociocultural evolution of humanity. That is the Stage we are currently analyzing called the Stage of Stalinist Socialism. (A distinct stage in sociocultural evolution between capitalism and communism – probably one of several such distinct sociocultural evolutionary stages between capitalism and communism – i.e., the Second Transitional Period, herein).

Making NEP Work 1924

When Lenin died at the end of January of 1924 he left behind, under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, a vast industrial espionage organization. This organization had its primary emphasis on stealing the otherwise unavailable industrial secrets of Germany, Italy and France with smaller operations in the smaller capitalist countries (ranging from Iberia to Eastern Europe.) These industrial “secrets” would normally have been available to other capitalists in other countries willing to pay licensing fees. However, the capitalist world had agreed on a program of denial of industrial process data to the SovietRepublic unless it was purchased with cash up front, and then if it was not technology which would make the SovietRepublic and its army stronger.

Neither Lenin nor Stalin had any intention of allowing foreign capitalists to strangle the Revolution. Modernizing Soviet industry would of course greatly empower the Soviet Government so it was natural, and to be expected, that the international great capitalist families would continue to deny their technology to global Bolshevism. Stalin explained all of this that year (1924) in his book Foundations of Leninism. – And, that book itself was presaged by Lenin in his Last Letter to the Party Congress where he started out saying exactly this.

At the center of this great international industrial espionage program of the Cheka’s Economic Directorate, was Stalin’s favorite Chekist Lev Feldbin (Alexander Orlov). First in Italy and then in Germany Orlov recruited thousands of intellectual agents and sent them into the war industries of these two imperialist countries. Eventually all of this German-Italian work would be headquartered in Switzerland. This German and Italian industrial espionage became known as the “Red Orchestra” and may have numbered 100,000 by the time Orlov was finished constructing.

Inside Snapshot

Richard Sorge becomes a Master of Deceit - New Year’s Day 1925

“I thought I’d get some work done while the place is relatively quiet. But, there’s no need for you to be working today Molotov.”

“Koba I thought we might catch up on a personnel matter for a few minutes and then I will excuse myself. Do you have time?”

”Sure. Why not now – catching up time is what it is – so what’s the problem?”

“It’s not a problem – the opposite perhaps. I have a new German assigned to Comintern Intelligence and I think you will find it useful to speak with him. I see an agent of enormous potential. He’s outside Koba just in case you had the time to speak with him. If you don’t he will certainly understand and is somewhat embarrassed to be asked to come at all.”

“Show him in Vlad. – And eventually I’ll read that file you’re carrying – I presume it’s his?

“Yes it is. Here it is. To outline verbally what’s in the summary – well, it essentially says that he was a German soldier from the intellectual petty-bourgeoisie for the Kaiser’s capitalist regime; he was interned for a while on the Russian Front; after the war he was returned to Germany. After his discharge he worked his way into what became our German Communist Party. He was exceptionally well regarded and was assigned as an armed guard for our delegates to the Comintern Conference in Berlin last year. He was recommended for Comintern Intelligence by Otto Kuusinen (the Bolshevik chief in Finland), so it came to you as Chief of Comintern Intelligence, that is to say, to my desk, and I endorsed the recommendation. He arrived last week.”

“Sorge, right?”

“Yes, Koba. How did you know?”

“You told me Vlad – last week. Or was it Otto?”

Molotov was searching his memory – he must have mentioned it in one of the briefings. But then Kuusinen had been here.

“Alright, that’s enough; he speaks Russian I take it?”

“Very well, for a German.”

“Show him in. This will give me a little New Year’s Day off time which I richly deserve after this last year – starting out as it did with the death of Illych. Fortunately, we got a break in the harvest, and the imperialists are all too busy at home dealing with their own workers to worry about us. So, we bought enough time to get this country re-organized. Yes, show him in.”

Even taking into account Koba’s affection for Alexander Orlov, it was Richard Sorge who was to become more the master’s pet than any other single agent in the history of Red Intelligence. Stalin spent a great deal of time with Sorge during the 1920’s and continued to do so in the years immediately preceding his dispatch to Tokyo. In the end, the time Comrade Stalin invested in his pupil proved to more than worth it. Sorge’s penetration of the Japanese Imperial Staff at the crucial time of their preparation for war with the Soviet Union (the summer of 1939) and later (in the summer of 1941) as the Nazi’s were heading for Moscow, would have been more than worth the time and effort in and of itself. But, after the Nazi invasion in June of 1941, Sorge would provide the Boss with the absolutely accurate knowledge Stalin needed to have about Japanese intentions on Socialism’s eastern frontier in order to know what to do next in the war against Germany, on the western frontier.

In the first case Stalin prepared a counteroffensive of a special type and along with his hand-picked general George Zhukov smashed permanently Japan’s hopes to succeed in the Soviet East. The matter was decided in the Battle of Khalkin-Gol where the Jap’s suffered their first smashing defeat of World War II (August, 1939). – And, in the case of the great Battle of Moscow (December 1941), Sorge’s spying on the Japanese Imperial Staff allowed Stalin to transfer Zhukov’s Siberian armies for the counter-attack at Moscow, December 5th, 1941. Inflicting the first smashing defeat on the Nazi’s of World War II.

It all started for Richard Sorge on New Year’s Day 1925, barely eleven months since Lenin’s death, down the Hall from Stalin’s Staraya street office. Actually it was a very large suite of offices and libraries that took up half of the top floor in a building which was a Moscow city block in size. The other half of the top floor was where the Intelligence Division of the Comintern had its General Staff offices, along with the Russian Party’s Secretariat. Lesser bureaus spread out all over the city from there – depending on space availability and need to be close to the Boss (or lack thereof.) Stalin used his Kremlin suite of offices mainly for ceremonial purposes – and, he had a cot in the former maid’s quarters where he often spent the five hours he allotted himself for sleep. Otherwise he worked every day of the year.

Robbing the Rich to help the Poor

Stalin loves being Koba

At any rate, Stalin had taken an interest in Sorge from his first day at Staff HQ. He let Felix Dzerzhinsky know he would run Sorge personally. Which was fine with the Cheka chief who was used to Stalin’s preference for direct management in some cases and had his hands full anyway.

Sorge’s first assignment from the Boss was to contact the dead Czar’s uncle (now in exile) and his other former associates in exile to facilitate their further financial contributions to the MOCR treasury so it could continue (and step up!) the great anti-Bolshevik struggle. If the Boss had a weakness it was his continuing desire to rob the aristocrats of everything they had – a way, I suspect, of ameliorating the pain he felt over the death of his first wife by poverty.

At any rate, and of course, all these Czarist bosses had no idea that at the head of their great organization was one of Joseph Stalin’s closest friends, Felix Dzerzhinsky, the proprietor of this real world Bates Motel! Or, what I like to call The MOCR Roach Motel.

The MOCR Roach Motel

In the interim since the winding down of the Civil War and re-establishment of law and order inside the Republic and Union, the Cheka had succeeded in getting a grip on the White Guardist conspirators aiming to overthrow Bolshevism and restore the Czarist monarchy. This had involved long and involved infiltration of specific agents into the White émigré leaders from Poland to Paris, and all points in between and around these capitals.

The Bolsheviks had actually created what the White Guard operators thought was their organization: the MOCR or Monarchist Organization for Central Russia. The survivors of the Romanov dynasty were among its highest leaders as were many generals left over from the Civil War defeats now in exile. Money from the wealthy coffers of these persons and their supporters flowed into the Cheka’s umbrella organization for rounding up all of the monarchist opponents of the revolution into one enemy.

Guest Registration

Checking into the Roach Motel were virtually all of the Czarist die-hards. Checking out was problematic.

One after the other, all of the MOCR’s leaders eventually had accidents, were kidnapped, or simply disappeared. One after the other, all of its projects eventually came to naught for apparent bad luck reasons. Yet the MOCR seemed always ready to pick up and get started all over again. Why? Because, its top “organizers” were actually Chekists.

A real world Norman Bates (Felix Dzerzhinsky) continued to run the Roach Motel with the full confidence of the Czar’s remaining top relatives and bureaucrats. The trick had three years yet to run in January of 1925 before its leaders would finally discover the comedy to which they had devoted nearly a decade of their anti-Bolshevik lives. By that time in 1928, whatever they might have accomplished against the Soviet Government in its weakest period was a long lost dream, never to be resuscitated. A lot of lakes were full of a lot of bodies.

The Cheka had done it again and disarmed the most dangerous enemies of the international working class movement long before they could fire their first shots. The Roach Motel strategy had worked perfectly and would work again and again in the future. (Today the FBI is doing the same thing with its front party CPUSA under its Special Agent Sam Webb.)

Tri-Partite Defense Strategy

In Summary, by New Year’s Day of 1925, Lenin dead not quite yet one year (January 21st), witnessed his successors finding themselves confronting a world where the proletarian revolution, as embodied in their perhaps unworthy selves, was surrounded by the capitalist encirclement. Somehow the Soviet Union would have to be modernized while the Bolsheviks waited for workers in the advanced capitalist countries to join in the worldwide Socialist revolution. This was a realistic strategy because the Bolsheviks had built temporary but strong defenses.

This defense was tri-partite with (1) Rapallo having split the capitalist alliance in the West; (2) MOCR rounding-up the Bolsheviks feudal-capitalist opposition dropping them into a killing bottle; now (3) the sincere Chinese reformist bourgeoisie of Sun Yat-sen would be put into place to protect the eastern frontiers of the Soviet Union.

Strangely enough the latter began in London where Soviet secret service (Cheka) agent Michael Borodin had been sent to try and put order into the Council movement there from a Bolshevik perspective back in 1920. In August of that year Borodin had succeeded in welding the disparate Marxist groups in Great Britain into one authorized Comintern Party – The Communist Party of Great Britain emerged. Borodin would subsequently return several times and a year later would organize a massive national strike movement.

Insurrection in London – winter 1921 - 1922

“Hang the King! Hang the Lords! Hang Parliament! Hang all the Bloodsuckers!”

The chanting rocked Parliament Square. The masses of protesting workers from the Coal, Steel and Railroad Unions had just finished listening to Scott Communist leader Willie Gallagher railing against the Government’s cutting of soldiers severance pay, the closing of striking coal mines, the rise in the price of coal, so essential to winter life in London in 1921. - And the Government’s refusal to pass legislation allowing every man and woman a vote, especially on the question of unemployment relief, had brought the present situation to a crisis. An American was speaking to some of them – those in front of Buckingham Palace - and he was demanding, coal now, wage increases for the mine workers, and recognition of the Soviet Republic. – And, the crowd, approaching a quarter of a million, extended for miles, totally blocking all the streets entering and leaving Parliament Square, and isolating the Palace.

The King, George Vth, and his wife were bravely waiting to face the mob as they called them. Protected by only a company of Guardsmen and a contingent of officer cadets, the situation was looking increasingly grim. In the Palace, panic had seized many, including the heirs to the throne.

“Father, mother, they’re going to kill us all just like they did the Czar!” cried David Prince of Wales (eventual King, if a short lived Kingship). The boy was truly terrified for only in nightmares about the Czar in Russia had he imagined such a thing. His brother appeared to be drunk! (The eventual King of England; after his brother’s abdication).

“Captain, take the boys away from all this,” spoke the King.

“Yes, you’re Majesty. Boys come with me.”

Another officer approached.

“Your Majesty’s I beg you come with me now while we still have time. The tunnel is still in our hands but it may not be for long.”

“We are not going anywhere major. I will face this unruly rabble and the Queen insists on staying at my side. Their problem is with the Government not the Crown and I will be sure they understand that.”

“Sir they don’t want to hear that. They want money, coal, and votes and God knows what all, and they hate all established authority. Sir, the communists have stirred up this mob and organized the strikes. – And, that American out there is running the show! Lenin sent him to organize all this because the Russians are deadly serious about what they want. If we don’t get you out now – well, Sir if the mob turns on the gate, although we will die fighting, we won’t be able to stop them, they will be in here in a matter of minutes. Again, I beg you – you have to get away.”

“It didn’t do the Czar any good to run major. Learn from history. Better to get it over with here and now.”

“The Kaiser ran Sir. It worked for him.”

“That’s true Major. I had forgotten about that in the midst of all this.”

Not only had the Kaisers flight saved his life, in the face of the rioting Berlin “mob”, but the German communist uprisings in the German Army, Navy, and in the factories of Berlin and Bavaria had brought the World War to an end.

By the way, this is a simple historical fact which the US rulers have done their best to obfuscate in US history books and US history classes ever since 1918, which as usual leaves the North American public with little comprehension of history other than that to be obtained from the mythology of US imperialism. In other word US citizens get little more than a daily diet of cleverly contrived propaganda as “news” and understanding of news, so they think somehow their soldiers must have won the First World War. In fact, the US late-coming role in the war had only peripherally to do with the denouement of the Kaiser and his regime. This substitution of propaganda for history, sadly gives the explanation for the pathetic ignorance, of even contemporary world history, exhibited by North Americans. A widespread ignorance, effecting college graduates as well as those finishing their education in the lower grades, so amazing to the intelligentsia of the rest of the world.

 “Major where is the Army?” asked the King.

“The Light Infantry Brigade can’t get through Your Majesty. The streets are barricaded, the workers are armed, and the horses have been attacked. The few other units within range have been stranded by the striking rail workers who refuse to move any military units.”

“The Navy?”

“Likewise you’re Majesty. The docks are in the hands of the communists and our closest ships can’t even moor at the docks. Sir, this could turn into a full scale revolution. Since Cromwell the Monarchy has not faced such a danger and if the mob turns Cromwellian they will do what they did before and they will hang you, the Lords and Parliament!”

The King and Queen finally acceded to their Guardsmen and ran.

They need not have because the “mob” settled for guarantees of a new election where Labour’s Left would have its right to contest, win, and take their Parliamentary seats. But it had been a close run thing.

The American referred to was Michael Borodin. Lenin had sent Borodin in 1921 to get the British would-be communists sorted out, disciplined and unified in one Party – the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). Soon MI5 and Scotland Yard would arrange for new quarters for Borodin at Wadsworth prison.

But unbeknownst to any of these participants in London was that the decision to bring Borodin back to Moscow for reassignment in China would soon be made by Lenin himself. The return arranged by Joseph Stalin.