A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

trains, ships, factories — until the radio broadcast once again: 'Lenin has died — but Leninism lives!'

In his will Lenin had expressed the wish to be buried next to his mother's grave in Petrograd. That was also the wish of his family. But Stalin wanted to embalm the corpse. If he was to keep alive the cult of Lenin, if he was to prove that 'Leninism lives', there had to be a body on display, one which, like the relics of the saints, was immune to corruption. He forced his plan through the Politburo against the objections of Trotsky, Bukharin and Kamenev. The idea of the embalmment was pardy inspired by the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922. Lenin's funeral was compared in Lzvestiia to those of 'the founders of the great states in ancient times'. But it probably owed as much to Stalin's Byzantine interpretation of the Russian Orthodox rites. Trotsky, who was horrified by Stalin's plan, compared it to the religious cults of the Middle Ages: 'Earlier there were the relics of Sergius of Radonezh and Serafim of Sarov; now they want to replace these with the relics of Vladimir Ilich.' At first they tried to preserve Lenin's body by refrigeration. But it soon began to decompose. A special team of scientists (known as the Commission for Immortalization) was appointed on 26 February, five weeks after Lenin's death, with the task of finding an embalming fluid. After working round the clock for several weeks, the scientists finally came up with a formula said to contain glycerine, alcohol and other chemicals (its precise composition is still kept a secret). Lenin's pickled body was placed in a wooden crypt — later replaced by the granite mausoleum which exists today — by the Kremlin wall on Red Square. It was opened to the public in August 1924.⁵⁰

Lenin's brain was removed from his body and transferred to the Lenin Institute. There it was studied by a team of scientists, charged with the task of discovering the 'substance of his genius'. They were to show that Lenin's brain represented a 'higher stage of human evolution'. It was sliced up into 30,000 segments, each stored between glass plates in carefully monitored conditions, so that future generations of scientists would be able to study it and discover its essential secrets. The brains of other 'undisputed geniuses' — Kirov, Kalinin, Gorky, Mayakovsky, Eisenstein and Stalin himself — were later added to this cerebral collection. They formed the beginnings of the Institute of the Brain, which still exists in Moscow today. In 1994 it publicized its final autopsy on Lenin: his was a perfectly average brain.⁵¹ Which just goes to show that ordinary brains can sometimes inspire extraordinary behaviour.

* * * What would have happened if Lenin had lived? Was Russia already set on the path of Stalinism? Or did the NEP and Lenin's last writings offer it a different departure? Historians should not really concern themselves with hypothetical questions. It is hard enough to establish what actually happened, let alone to

prophesy what might (or in this case might not) have happened. But the consequences of Lenin's succession are perhaps large enough to warrant a few words of speculation. After all, so much of the history of the revolution has been written from the perspective of what happened inside Stalin's Russia that one may well ask whether there was any real alternative.

On the one hand it seems clear that the basic elements of the Stalinist regime — the one-party state, the system of terror and the cult of the personality — were all in place by 1924. The party apparatus was, for the most part, an obedient tool in Stalin's hands. The majority of its provincial bosses had been appointed by Stalin himself, as the head of the Orgburo, in the civil war. They shared his plebeian hatred for the specialists and the intelligentsia, were moved by his rhetoric of proletarian solidarity and Russian nationalism, and on most questions of ideology were willing to defer to their Great Leader. After all, they were the former subjects of the tsars. Lenin's last struggle for the 'democratic' reform of the party was never likely to succeed in its attempt to change this basic culture. His proposed reforms were purely bureaucratic, concerned only with the reform of the internal structure of the dictatorship, and as such were incapable of addressing the real problem of the NEP: the strained political relationship between the regime and society, the unconquered countryside in particular. Without a genuine democratization, without a basic change in the ruling attitudes of the Bolsheviks, the NEP was always doomed to fail. Economic freedom and dictatorship are incompatible in the long term.

On the other hand, there were fundamental differences between Lenin's regime and that of Stalin. Fewer people were murdered for a start. And, despite the ban on factions, the party still made room for comradely debate. Trotsky and Bukharin argued passionately with each other about the strategy of the NEP — the former favoured squeezing the foodstuffs from the peasantry whenever the breakdown of the market system threatened to slow down industrialization, whereas Bukharin was prepared to allow a slower pace of industrialization so as to maintain a market-based relationship with the peasantry — but these were still intellectual debates, both men were supporters of the NEP, and, despite their differences, neither would have dreamt of using these debates as a pretext to murder one another or to send their opponents to Siberia. Only Stalin was capable of this. He alone saw that Trotsky and Bukharin had become so blinded by their own political debates and rivalry that he could use the one to destroy the other.

In this sense Stalin's personal role was itself the crucial factor — as was, by his absence, Lenin's role as well. If Lenin's final stroke had not prevented him from speaking at the Congress in 1923, Stalin's name today would occupy a place only in the footnotes of Russian history books. But that 'if was, if you will, in the hands of providence, and this is history not theology.

Conclusion

'I do not believe that in the twentieth century there is such a thing as a 'betrayed people',' Gorky wrote to Romain Rolland in 1922. 'The idea of a 'betrayed people' is nothing but a legend. Even in Africa there are only peoples not yet organized and therefore powerless politically.'¹ Gorky's view of the Russian Revolution denied that the people had been betrayed by it. Their revolutionary tragedy lay in the legacies of their own cultural backwardness rather than the evil of some 'alien' Bolsheviks. They were not the victims of the revolution but protagonists in its tragedy. This may be a painful lesson for the Russian people to learn at the end of the twentieth century. Seventy years of Communist oppression might well be thought to have earned them the right to see themselves as victims. But Russia's prospects as a democratic nation depend to a large extent on how far the Russians are able to confront their own recent history; and this must entail the recognition that, however much the people were oppressed by it, the Soviet system grew up in Russian soil. It was the weakness of Russia's democratic culture which enabled Bolshevism to take root. This was the legacy of Russian history, of centuries of serfdom and autocratic rule, that had kept the common people powerless and passive. 'And the people remained silent' was a Russian proverb — and it describes much of Russian history. To be sure, this was a people's tragedy but it was a tragedy which they helped to make. The Russian people were trapped by the tyranny of their own history.

'We are slaves because we are unable to free ourselves,' Herzen once wrote. If there was one lesson to be drawn from the Russian Revolution it was that the people had failed to emancipate themselves. They had failed to become their own political masters, to free themselves from emperors and become citizens. Kerensky's speech of 1917, in which he claimed that the Russian people were perhaps no more than 'rebellious slaves', was to haunt the revolution in succeeding years. For while the people could destroy the old system, they could not rebuild a new one of their own. None of the democratic organizations established before October 1917 survived more than a few years of Bolshevik rule, at least not in their democratic form. By 1921, if not earlier, the revolution had come full circle, and a new autocracy had been imposed on Russia which in many ways resembled the old one.

To explain this failure of democracy one must go back into Russian history. Centuries of serfdom and autocratic rule had prevented the ordinary people from acquiring the consciousness of citizens. One can draw a direct line from this serf culture to the despotism of the Bolsheviks. The abstract concept of the 'political nation', of a constitutional structure of civic rights, which had underpinned the French Revolution, remained largely alien to the Russian peasantry, confined in their isolated village worlds. The popular notion of power in Russia continued to be articulated in terms of coercive domination and quasi-religious authority derived from the traditions of serfdom and autocracy rather than in terms of a modern law-based state distributing rights and duties between citizens. The everyday power that the peasant knew — the power of the gentry captain and the police — was arbitrary and violent. To defend himself from this despotism he relied not on appeals to legal rights — indeed he replicated this