Koba the Dread Read online

  ‘Rule by yobs. That’s what you want. Why?’

  ‘Yup. Rule by yobs. What I want is the berks in the saddle. Rule by yobs.’

  These exchanges took place in a spirit of humorous appraisal, mutual appraisal. We were not quite yet the best friends we would become, and politics was part of the distance between us. Rule by yobs, incidentally, or the dictatorship of the proletariat (an outcome only academically entertained by the Bolsheviks), provided the flavour of the superficial and temporary rearrangement taking place in England then: the transfer of wealth, as the Labour Party put it, to the working classes and their families. I was partly going with the culture, perhaps, but this idea (with 99 per cent income tax in the top bracket, etc.) so little offended me that I too voted for the continuation of Labour policies. Or I tried. On General Election day in 1978 my brother and I (Labour) agreed, in the fascist mansion, to stay at home and swap votes with two in situ Conservatives. The Conservatives (we felt) pretended to misunderstand this arrangement and drove off to vote in my step-uncle’s car: a fascist Jaguar. (‘That’s four votes you cheated us out of,’ I said with some heat to my step-uncle. ‘No. Two votes,’ he corrected.) Meanwhile, the social effect of trade-union – they used to say trades-union – ascendancy was everywhere apparent. And profound and retroactive. It made me believe that the people of these islands had always hated each other. And this isn’t true. The hatred, the universal disobligingness, was a political deformation, and it didn’t last.

  James Fenton said little during these semi-serious disputes, although they often took place in his office (which was always incredibly tidy, with no more than a lone paper clip on the whole sweep of the desk. Julian’s desk was incredibly tidy, also featuring the lone paper clip. My desk was a haystack. Christopher’s desk was a haystack. ‘You and Christopher ought to get married,’ said James resignedly. He was best friends with Christopher, too. And they shared the politics.) James said little during these disputes. Like Christopher, he saw no hope in the ‘actually existing’ socialism of the USSR, and actively opposed it. Very roughly, their political faith imagined a return to the well of revolutionary energy through the figure of Trotsky, that great eidolon of thwarted possibility. James had had his counter-experiences in Vietnam and Cambodia. But I wondered how he felt, qua poet, about the place of art in a socialist state; and, I thought, he must hate the language, the metallic clichés, the formulas and euphemisms, the supposedly futuristic and time-thrifty acronyms and condensations.5 Once, when we had a solemn lunch together, James formulated his (local) position as follows: ‘I want a Labour government that is weak against the trade unions.’ And England, I unelegiacally thought, was going to get that kind of government. This was the future, and it was Left.

  So on the phone, the other day, I said to Christopher, ‘We’ll have to have a long talk about this.’

  ‘A long talk.’

  ‘Because I’m wondering about the distance between Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany.’

  ‘Oh don’t fall for that, Mart. Don’t fall for moral equivalence.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Lenin was … a great man.’

  ‘Oh no he wasn’t.’

  ‘This will be a long talk.’

  ‘A long talk.’

  But progress has already been made. The argument, now, is about whether Bolshevik Russia was ‘better’ than Nazi Germany. In the days when the New Left dawned, the argument was about whether Bolshevik Russia was better than America.

  4 The New Statesman was founded in 1913 by, among others (and the others included Maynard Keynes), the century’s four most extravagant dupes of the USSR: H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Wells, after an audience with Stalin in 1934, said that he had ‘never met a man more candid, fair and honest’; these attributes accounted for ‘his remarkable ascendancy over the country since no one is afraid of him and everyone trusts him’. Shaw, after some banquet diplomacy, declared the Russian people uncommonly well-fed at a time when perhaps 11 million citizens (Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991) were in the process of dying of starvation. The Webbs, after extensive study, wrote a book which, ‘seen as the last word in serious Western scholarship, ran to over 1,200 pages, representing a vast amount of toil and research, all totally wasted. It was originally entitled Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation?, but the question mark was triumphantly removed in the second edition – which appeared in 1937 at precisely the time the regime was in its worst phase’ (Conquest). Sidney and Beatrice Webb swallowed the great Show Trials of 1936–38, and the New Statesman was not much less sceptical: ‘We do not deny … that the confessions may have contained a substratum of truth’; ‘there had undoubtedly been much plotting in the USSR’; and so on.

  5 What Nabokov characterizes as the Com-pom-poms – Sovnarkom and Narkomindel, and so on; the state liquor monopoly was called Soyuzsprit; the agency shunting the Mandelstams around in the early 1920s was unencouragingly known as Centroevac.

  Ten Theses on Ilyich

  (i.)

  In his letter to Maxim Gorky about the fate of the country’s intellectuals (‘they’re not its brains. They’re its shit’), Lenin wrote (15 September 1922):

  [The writer Vladimir Korolenko] is a pitiful philistine, trapped in bourgeois prejudices! For gentlemen such as this ten million dead in the imperialist war is something worth supporting … while the death of hundreds of thousands in a just civil war against the landowners and capitalists makes them oh! and ah! and sigh and go into hysterics.

  This is the usual figure for military losses in World War I (all belligerent nations): c. 7,800,000. This is the usual figure for military losses in the Civil War: c. 1,000,000. But then, in the Russian case, there were a further 12 million civilian losses. ‘[T]hese figures tell only half the story, since obviously, under normal conditions, the population would not have remained stationary but grown,’ writes Richard Pipes in Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime. By this calculation the number goes up to 23 million. And there is, I think, a good case for including the birth deficit. Because the Russian experiment wasn’t conducted for the betterment of the poor wretches who happened to be alive at the time; it was conducted in the name of their children and their children’s children … Was the, or a, Civil War inevitable? Was there so much bad blood that the census was foredoomed to its astronomical minus? Well, the Civil War became inevitable when Lenin took power. There are dozens of quotations, slogans, rallying cries attesting to his enthusiasm for civil war. The same is true of Trotsky. Civil war was a cornerstone of Bolshevik policy.

  (ii.)

  Lenin suffered his first stroke in May 1922. In September he wrote the ferocious letter to Gorky. In the intervening July he was drawing up his many lists of intellectuals for arrest and deportation or internal exile. A month earlier Lenin’s doctors had asked him to multiply 12 by 7. Three hours later he solved the problem by addition: 12 + 12 = 24, 24 + 12 = 36 … The ex-believer Dmitri Volkogonov comments in his Lenin: A New Biography:

  He had covered a twenty-one-page notepad with childish scrawls … The future of an entire generation of the flower of the Russian intelligentsia was being decided by a man who could barely cope with an arithmetical problem for a seven-year-old.

  There were further strokes. Later, Lenin’s wife Krupskaya taught him to repeat (and it only worked under direct prompting) the words ‘peasant’, ‘worker’, ‘people’ and ‘revolution’… Adam Ulam has described the nihilism of the Russian revolutionary tradition as ‘at once childish and nightmarish’. The dying Lenin – and, frequently, the living Lenin, too – was childish and nightmarish. In his last ten months he was reduced to monosyllables. But at least they were political monosyllables: vot-vot (here-here) and sezd-sezd (congress-congress).

  (iii.)

  It fills you with extraordinary torpor to learn that Lenin read Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s insuperably talentless novel What Is To Be Done? (1863) five times in o
ne summer. To read this book once in five summers would defeat most of us; but Lenin persisted. ‘It completely reshaped me,’ he said in 1904. ‘This is a book that changes one for a whole lifetime.’ Its greatest merit, he stressed, was that it showed you ‘what a revolutionary must be like’. Humiliating though it may feel, we are obliged to conclude that What Is To Be Done? is the most influential novel of all time. With its didactic portrait of the revolutionary New Man, its ‘russification’ of current radical themes, and its contempt for ordinary people, ‘Chernyshevsky’s novel, far more than Marx’s Capital, supplied the emotional dynamic that eventually went to make the Russian Revolution’ (Joseph Frank). I am reminded of a recent aside by a Russian writer (Victor Erofeyev) who was trying to account for the cult of Rasputin. There are ‘some grounds for saying,’ he wrote, that ‘deep down, Russia has nothing in common with the West’.

  (iv.)

  In championing the ‘unprecedentedly shameful peace’ with Imperial Germany (the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk), Lenin temporarily lost ground within the Party. On economic policy he was now stampeded by the visionaries, notably Bukharin. This is Trotsky:

  In Lenin’s ‘Theses on the Peace’, written in early 1918, it says that ‘the triumph of socialism in Russia [required] a certain interval of time, no less than a few months’. At present [1924] such words seem completely incomprehensible: was not this a slip of the pen, did he not mean to speak of a few years or decades? But no … I recall very clearly that in the first period, at Smolny, at meetings of the Council of People’s Commissars, Lenin invariably repeated that we shall have socialism in half a year and become the mightiest state.

  Thus the regime moved to eliminate a) law, b) foreign relations, c) private property, d) commerce, and e) money. The means chosen to eliminate money was state-driven hyperinflation. In ‘the second half of 1919, “treasury operations” – in other words, the printing of money – consumed between 45 and 60 per cent of budgetary expenditures’ (Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution). During the attempted invasion of Poland in 1920, Lenin sent the following instruction to a Red Army commissar:

  A beautiful plan. Finish it off with Dzerzhinsky. Under the guise of ‘Greens’6 (and we will pin it on them later) we shall go forward for ten-twenty versts and hang the kulaks, priests and landowners. Bounty: 100,000 rubles for each man hanged.

  By 1921, 100,000 rubles was worth two prewar kopeks.7 At this time the set of policies retrospectively labelled War Communism was being abandoned in favour of the New Economic Policy (NEP), which, in effect, legalized the black market that was feeding the cities – with difficulty. The net result of War Communism was the obliteration of the industrial base and the worst famine in European history.

  (v.)

  Lenin (19 March 1922):

  It is now and only now, when in the regions afflicted by the famine there is cannibalism and the roads are littered with hundreds if not thousands of corpses, that we can (and therefore must) pursue the acquisition of [church] valuables with the most ferocious and merciless energy, stopping at nothing in suppressing all resistance … [N]o other moment except that of desperate hunger will offer us such a mood among the broad peasant masses, which will either assure us of their sympathy, or, at any rate, their neutrality … [W]e must now give the most decisive and merciless battle to the [clergy] and subdue its resistance with such brutality that they will not forget it for decades to come … The greater the number of the representatives of the reactionary bourgeoisie and reactionary clergy that we will manage to execute in this affair, the better.

  Church records show that 2,691 priests, 1,962 monks and 3,447 nuns were killed that year. During an earlier Russian famine, that of 1891, in which half a million died, famine relief was a national priority. In the regional capital of Samara only one intellectual, a twenty-two-year-old lawyer, refused to participate in the effort – and, indeed, publicly denounced it. This was Lenin. He ‘had the courage’, as a friend put it,

  to come out and say openly that famine would have numerous positive results … Famine, he explained, in destroying the outdated peasant economy, would … usher in socialism … Famine would also destroy faith not only in the tsar, but in God too.

  Famine belongs to the Communist tetrarchy – the other three elements being terror, slavery and, of course, failure, monotonous and incorrigible failure.

  (vi.)

  It has often been said that the Bolsheviks ruled as if conducting a war against their own people.8 But you could go further and say that the Bolsheviks were conducting a war against human nature. Lenin to Gorky:

  Every religious idea, every idea of God … is unutterable vileness … of the most dangerous kind, ‘contagion’ of the most abominable kind. Millions of sins, filthy deeds, acts of violence and physical contagions … are far less dangerous than the subtle, spiritual idea of God decked out in the smartest ‘ideological’ costumes…

  Religion is reaction, certainly (and wasn’t the Tsar meant to be divine?). But religion is also human nature. One recalls John Updike’s argument: the only evidence for the existence of God is the collective human yearning that it should be so. The war against religion was part of the war against human nature, which was prosecuted on many other fronts.

  (vii.)

  Lenin’s famine of 1921–22 (c. 5 million dead) was not in origin terroristic. Weather played a part; but so did the Bolshevik policy of requisitioning – of taking the peasants’ grain without paying for it. Deprived of incentive, the peasants practised circumvention; and the regime, as always, responded with a crescendo of force, whose climax was the weapon of hunger. Unlike Stalin’s famine of 1933, Lenin’s famine was officially recognized as such.9 In July 1921 Maxim Gorky was given permission to form a relief committee (consisting mostly of intellectuals) and to launch an international appeal. Socialism, far from catapulting Russia into planetary prepotence, had reduced her to beggary. Lenin felt himself heckled by a reality now known all over the world, and the humiliation expressed itself in a bitterly defensive xenophobia. He did no more than harry and obstruct the American Relief Administration. But when the crisis was over he went after Gorky’s committee. First there was a campaign of vilification in the press, claiming that the ARA was, of all things, ‘counter-revolutionary’. This is from The Harvest of Sorrow:

  … the non-Communist Russian relief representatives in Moscow were arrested in the autumn of 1921 (at a time when Maxim Gorky was out of the country). Intervention by [Herbert] Hoover personally resulted in the commutation of death sentences …

  (viii.)

  To be clear: Lenin bequeathed to his successors a fully functioning police state. The independence of the press was destroyed within days of the October coup d’état. The penal code was rewritten in November/December (and already we see the elastic category, ‘enemy of the people’: ‘All individuals suspected [sic] of sabotage, speculation, and opportunism are now liable to be arrested immediately’). Forced food-requisitioning began in November. The Cheka (or secret police) was in place by December. Concentration camps were established in early 1918 (and so was the use of psychiatric hospitals as places of detention). Then came fulminant terror: executions by quota; ‘collective responsibility’, whereby the families and even the neighbours of enemies of the people, or suspected enemies of the people, were taken hostage; and the extermination not only of political opponents but also of social and ethnic groups – the kulaks, or better-off peasants, for example, and the Cossacks (‘de-Cossackization’). The differences between the regimes of Lenin and Stalin were quantitative, not qualitative. Stalin’s one true novelty was the discovery of another stratum of society in need of purgation: Bolsheviks.

  (ix.)

  Unlike Stalin, Lenin could plead mitigation – though, like Stalin, he would not have so pleaded.10 In March 1887 Lenin’s older brother Alexander was arrested for conspiring to murder his namesake, Tsar Alexander III; a plea for clemency would have reduced his sentence to hard labour, but Alexander was possessed of th
e courage of youth and, two months later, was duly hanged. He was twenty-one. Vladimir Ilyich was seventeen. And their father had died the previous year. Clearly the consequences of these events are entitled to be boundless. My sense of it is that Lenin’s moral faculties stopped developing thereafter. Hence his foul-mouthed tantrums, his studied amorality, his flirtatious nihilism, his positively giggly response to violence: his nightmarish childishness. How terrible it is to read the verdict of the Australian historian Manning Clark, who found Lenin ‘Christ-like, at least in his compassion’ and ‘as excited and lovable as a little child’.

  (x.)

  The trouble with Lenin was that he thought you could achieve things by coercion and terror and murder. ‘The dictatorship – and take this into account once and for all – means unrestricted power based on force, not on law’ (January 1918). ‘It is a great mistake to think that the NEP put an end to terror. We shall return to terror and to economic terror’ (March 1922). And so on – again, there are dozens of such statements. On his first day in office Lenin was looking the other way when the Second Congress of Soviets abolished the death penalty.11 ‘Nonsense,’ said Lenin: ‘how can you make a revolution without executions?’ To think otherwise was ‘impermissible weakness’, ‘pacifist illusion’, and so on. You needed capital punishment, or it wouldn’t be a ‘real’ revolution – like the French Revolution (and unlike the English Revolution or the American Revolution or, indeed, the Russian Revolution of February 1917). Lenin wanted executions; he had his heart set on executions. And he got them. The possibility has been suggested that in the period 1917–24 more people were murdered by the secret police than were killed in all the battles of the Civil War.12