By 1917 the dynasty was tottering. Lacking the leadership, equipment, and supplies necessary for success millions of Russians had been killed, wounded, or captured fighting for nothing meaningful. The home front was demoralized: the government was failing, the army was retreating, people were hungry, and crowds were rioting. With domestic garrisons unwilling to fire on protestors and afraid of being sent to the front, there was no one to defend the regime.
In March the Czar abdicated, leaving a weak provisional government in charge. It competed for influence with soldiers’ and workers’ “soviets,” or councils. The new authorities committed a second fatal mistake, continuing the war. Lawyer and politician Alexander Kerensky came to the fore, becoming prime minister in July and launching a disastrous offensive that quickly collapsed. The only lasting result was more casualties. Until then Lenin, reviled for having traveled to Russia with German assistance — Berlin could not have imagined the ultimate effectiveness of its strategy to undermine the nascent revolutionary republic — was a minor force whose efforts to take control were easily defeated.
However, Lenin, unlike even many members of his party, understood what most Russians desired: peace, bread, and land. In November the Bolsheviks staged a coup d’etat, easily overthrowing what had become a government without support, authority, credibility, or troops. Almost alone he insisted on signing a peace treaty with Germany, irrespective of terms, since to keep fighting would mean the Bolsheviks’ overthrow as well. There was still a bitter, multi-sided civil war to win, and that ran for some five horrendous years, with scattered resistance continuing into 1923. As many as ten million people, the vast majority civilians, died in the hostilities. Atrocities were common on all sides. The allies intervened half-heartedly, with most foreign forces, other than the Japanese, withdrawing by 1920. In the end Lenin stood triumphant, with unchallenged authority.
Even after vanquishing enemies both domestic and foreign, however, he could not rest. The country was in terrible shape and the new Soviet state had to be constructed. He sacrificed socialist nostrums to push the New Economic Policy, which retained capitalist incentives, in a desperate attempt to promote economic recovery.
But Lenin’s health was fragile. In May 1922 he suffered his first stroke. The second came in December. He remained involved in policy, but his influence diminished as his health weakened. Lenin’s third stroke came in March 1923, largely removing him from politics. On January 21, 1924, he fell into a coma and died.
So much effort to take control, so little time to enjoy power! It recalls Luke 12:20, in which Jesus tells the parable of the rich man planning to build bigger barns and take life easy: “But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’”
Who got what Lenin prepared for himself? Joseph Stalin! With consequences almost beyond imagination. Collectivization and starvation, terror and purges, the Gulag and forced labor. The horror was not just domestic. Communism accompanied the Red Army as it moved west into Europe as World War II concluded. The result was what Ronald Reagan so appropriately called the Evil Empire. Stalin’s death in 1953 only moderated the oppression. Not until Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise three decades later did the Soviet Union finally disappear into history’s ever-expanding trash dump.
Although Stalin’s rule likely was far worse than Lenin’s would have been, no one should have illusions about what the latter would have meant. Lenin wanted power and would do anything to get it. There was no squishy humanitarianism in his writing, which demanded harsh, violent action. He was the driving force in the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power. Had the party instead wavered its moment might have passed.
Lenin commanded during the increasingly repressive consolidation of power. He was central to the Reds defeating the Whites during the civil war, selecting the brutal, ruthless, and surprisingly effective Leon Trotsky as military commissar. Lenin likely ordered the execution of the Czar and the entire royal family, including children. To maintain domestic control Lenin established the Cheka, or secret police, headed by Felix Dzerzhinsky, a hardened Polish revolutionary.
In 1918 the latter initiated the infamous Red Terror, which lasted through 1922. Lenin insisted, “It is necessary secretly — and urgently — to prepare the terror.” All opposition was cruelly crushed: “Tens of thousands, and possibly more than a million, people were branded ‘class enemies’ and detained in concentration camps or summarily executed. The terror cleared the way for decades of Soviet rule and state-sanctioned violence.”
Finally, Lenin selected Stalin as the Communist Party general secretary because of the latter’s harsh commitment to communism. Lenin might have had second thoughts about his choice — though there are suspicions that his famous last testament was concocted by others — but if so, Lenin’s displeasure was over Stalin’s incivility to colleagues rather than willingness to murder opponents. Modern communists admit, “There were virtually no ideological or political differences or disagreements between Lenin and Stalin.”
Perhaps the best evidence of Lenin’s brutal centrality to communism’s essential inhumanity is the regime’s survival after his death. His death triggered a lengthy power struggle won by Stalin, but the Soviet Union’s survival was not in doubt. Although Stalin’s depredations were extraordinary, they were merely unexpected exaggerations of the horrors unleashed by Lenin’s less developed terror system. No doubt, Lenin would not have approved the Great Terror, but not out of quaint moral sentiments. Rather, he would be appalled at the waste of so many committed revolutionaries who could have been put to work building a more powerful if slightly less murderous socialist state.
For enthusiastic communists Lenin’s death came too early. For the rest of humanity it came far too late. A century later we are still suffering the barbarities that he did so much to unleash.
