Lenin did not even begin to build socialism in Russia, argues Pipes. He “smashed” the czarist order (Marx’s word) and left behind a single-party dictatorship that kept on smashing. Lenin bequeathed his personal style to the Soviet state: disciplined and conspiratorial, comfortable with violence. While exhorting other people to take up a “gun, revolver, bomb, knife, brass knuckles, rag soaked in kerosene to start fires,” Lenin himself had a cowardly side. He cheered on most of the 1905 uprising from Switzerland and Finland. In 1914 he lobbied for war from back in neutral Switzerland and in 1917 hid out in Finland while Trotsky stage-managed the Bolshevik coup. Nonetheless, the revolution would have gone nowhere without the force of Lenin’s will. Power emanated from the little bald man, said a socialist contemporary, “like the spirit of universal destruction.”
Pipes, a Harvard historian who served for a time as Ronald Reagan’s chief expert on the Soviet Union, traces the start of the Russian Revolution to a mundane university uprising in 1899. Students took to the streets after czarist authorities forbade unofficial anniversary celebrations honoring the University of St. Petersburg. The point is that the revolution was made of such minor stuff. To Czar Nicholas II, any concession–from allowing a student lark to forming a cabinet–was a subversive assault on his God-given power. The weak Parliament he was forced to permit in 1905 became not an arena for compromise but a stamping ground for extremists. The concepts of law, of give-and-take, even of national identity simply did not exist. Peasants watched out for their households and acted for the greater good only when forced to. Rulers “saw Russia as under permanent siege by her inhabitants, believed ready to pounce and tear the country apart at the slightest hint [of weakness],” Pipes writes.
The mix of venom and violence was made for an opportunist like Lenin. His “Great October Revolution” was a coup so quiet that the Petrograd Stock Exchange hardly blipped when the Bolsheviks seized power. He held little regard for the Russian proletariat, or even for Russians. (“An intelligent Russian is almost always a Jew,” he said, “or someone with Jewish blood in his veins.”) Switching the capital from Petrograd to Moscow, he slunk into the Kremlin in the dead of night with his Latvian bodyguards–as if a British prime minister had moved to the Tower of London under the protection of Sikhs, Pipes suggests. His “War Communism”–forcefully taking grain from the peasants–and the Red Terror were attempts to consolidate power in the worst traditions of a “hard czar.”
Echoes of 1918: As Pipes examines the debris of Lenin’s assault on society, his history blends uncannily with today’s newspaper headlines. The bread shortages, crime waves and rampant inflation now afflicting the Soviet Union are all echoes of 1918. Reluctant outposts of the empire like Tataria and Bashkiria, which declared their independence under Lenin, are trying again under Gorbachev. Lenin gave away much of Eastern Europe in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk; are Gorbachev’s attempts to keep the world at bay all that different? Lenin’s socialists were created by the 18th-century idea that “reason”–rather than messy concepts like majority rule–can govern life. That idea made it possible for a dictatorship of the intelligentsia to succeed the monarchy. Are Gorbachev’s gropings for democratic reform equally vulnerable to some new authoritarian idea?
Pipes offers a sympathetic profile of Pyotr Stolypin, the reformist prime minister installed by the czar to try to placate the masses after the 1905 revolution. Stolypin bolstered the class of landowning peasants in an attempt to encourage rural prosperity and stability. He promoted civil liberties and self-government. More generally, he appealed for Russian national interests to take priority over partisanship. In the Russia of his time, of course, “with one set of “purist’ principles confronting others, equally uncompromising, there was no room for Stolypin’s pragmatic idealism,” Pipes concludes. The reformer began to blunder and to lose authority, and eventually he was assassinated. Is Russia finally ready to take Stolypin’s path after 73 years of Leninism? Pipes has provided a brilliantly focused portrait of what lies in the other direction.
