The Importance of Lenin’s Last Writings

Vladimir Lenin suffered his first sclerotic attack in May 1922, a month after he had turned 52. He was to be battered by three more strokes, one in December 1922, the second on March 10, 1923, and the third on January 21, 1924, the day he died.

While he partly recovered his ability to work after the first attack, the second episode was deadlier, and the third laid him low for the rest of his days. He lost his speech, the use of the right side of his body, had to be pushed around in his wheel-chair and would not be able to hold a pen in his hand ever again. So, between the third attack and his death, Lenin could neither put pen on paper nor even dictate a note to a secretary, with the result that he published nothing at all after March 4, 1923, the day that Pravda carried his last essay captioned ‘Better Fewer, But Better’.

But between end-December 1922 and early-March 1923 – i.e., between the second and the third strokes – he produced a significant body of work touching upon important aspects of governance, the Party, and mass culture. These writings are remarkable on several counts. One, though they are among the most tightly argued pieces of writing in Lenin’s oeuvre, they are suffused with an extraordinary sense of personal urgency. Two, they bear few signs that their writer was a terminally sick man who had to depend entirely on someone else (a secretary, in this case) to transcribe thoughts that the writer himself  verbalised only with great difficulty, thanks to his slurred speech.

Finally, these articles (including notes and letters to the ensuing party Congress) represent the most searching critique by the leader of a government anywhere of his own administration’s report card. Indeed, more than perhaps anything else he had done at any other time, Lenin’s work in these last few months of his active life sets him apart from nearly every other modern-day statesman we can think of. Here was a man who knew his end was near, and he was determined to use every ounce of his ebbing strength to save the revolution he had helped bring about. In the event, his efforts were frustrated, but that takes little away from their nobility.

Also Read: The Last Weeks of Valdimir Lenin’s Life

The sense that the revolution was hopelessly adrift had been growing on Lenin for a while, at least since a little before his first stroke. Proposing the Party’s political resolution at the 11th Party Congress of March-April 1922, he had talked about an uncanny sensation he sometimes had of being in the driver’s seat of a vehicle the driver could not steer in the direction he wanted to, try however hard he might. At first, this sounded like a casual remark, but Lenin returned to the same theme a few more times in course of the Congress.

“Powerful forces diverted the Soviet state from its proper road,” he said more than once. At the time, it was a somewhat curious statement to have come from a man who seemed always to be supremely confident of his mission, whose unbending will drew admiration from even his enemies. Lenin himself appeared at first to be only vaguely troubled by such thoughts. But slowly this feeling came to take hold of him until it gripped him completely. He was racked by doubts, apprehensions, even alarm.

The spells of sclerotic paralysis that began to torment him at this point served only to deepen his gloom. Lenin’s last writings were shaped by this crisis in his life.

What triggered this crisis? Lenin seldom appeared to lose his equanimity through post-revolutionary Russia’s most fraught period – the years 1917-1921 – when the fate of the revolution hung by a slender thread and he was obliged to drive disagreeable, sometimes even repugnant, changes to the original Bolshevik schema of a free and open society.

How is it, then, that he began to feel alienated from the state he himself had helped to build when it was settling down to relative stability, orderliness and peace? The year before, while piloting the New Economic Policy through his government and his party, Lenin had faced the stiffest opposition from large sections of the Bolshevik leadership who thought the policy changes were retrogressive and reactionary. By now, thankfully, NEP appeared to be paying off and the economy was returning to a semblance of normality. Why this agonising over the revolution’s future at this point, then?

Part of the answer to this question lies in Lenin’s recognition that he had perhaps gone too far in pushing to consolidate the revolution’s gains; that some of what he had done made a mockery of his own principles, setting Russia on a path very different to the one he had envisaged. But he also knew that much of what had happened was tied to the extreme backwardness – economic, social and cultural – that Russia had been mired in for centuries.

The near-complete absence of all democratic traditions in the country was both the cause and the consequence of this backwardness. Russia had been the classical antithesis to a potentially revolutionary society and only an extraordinary conjunction of explosive circumstances had hastened the dismantling of the old political order. But the new political structure had necessarily to draw upon the culture of the ancient regime for as long as the troubling legacy of cultural backwardness had not been fully extirpated.

Lenin and his close allies had hoped for that extirpation to happen quickly and for a new, forward-looking and more democratic culture to take its place. The problems of backwardness did, however, prove to be far more intractable than they had anticipated.  The old bureaucracy with its arrogance of power, its penchant for red-tape and self-aggrandisement and its cynical disregard of the needs of a new society, was back at most levers of power within the government.

Worse, its contagion had been spreading to the Party as well, and a new culture of privilege and personal hegemony was emerging within Party apparatuses at some places. Packing important positions with favourites, unquestioning deference to powerful leaders, jockeying for important positions and even low intrigue were not only no longer unthinkable, they were even becoming commonplace at many levels. Narrow-mindedness and intolerance began to show up often in intra-party affairs.

Also Read: Lenin in Urdu: His Every Word Became Poetry

Lenin could not have been unaware of these developments. As someone who “had brought up his party in an enthusiasm as ardent and a discipline as severe as were the enthusiasm and the discipline of Cromwell’s soldiers” (in Isaac Deutscher’s memorable words), the knowledge could not but have affected him profoundly. He did try to intervene in some cases, without much success, and his failure to stem the rot only aggravated Lenin’s angst.

But the tipping point came with his realisation that a section of the Party leadership was approaching what had come to be known as the ‘Nationalities Question’ in a spectacularly insensitive and authoritarian fashion. The issue revolved around the terms on which smaller states like Georgia and Ukraine would join Russia in a federated union of Soviet republics (later called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or USSR).

As the Commissar for Nationalities, Stalin had been charged with the responsibility of creating for the Union a platform based on mutual respect and equality. However, Stalin was one of those ‘russified’ Georgians (as Lenin was to characterise him later) who were convinced that, as the largest and the most powerful republic, Russia’s pre-eminence in the Union was beyond question. He was therefore pushing for a structure which would accommodate the smaller states only as lesser partners. A stand-off ensued between Georgian communists and Stalin, and Stalin’s emissary to Tifilis (now Tblisi) behaved outrageously with the local leadership, kicking up a hideous row and leading the Georgian leaders to resign en masse.

The news reached Lenin in bits and pieces as he was convalescing after his second stroke, and he was appalled. He was bitterly disappointed in Stalin, whose candidature as the Party’s general secretary he himself had endorsed with enthusiasm a few months earlier. And further enquiries from his sickbed now suggested to him that Stalin was not only behaving imperiously with colleagues here and there, but seemed also to be steadily gathering up all the threads of power in his hands. Lenin decided that he had to act, no matter that his capacity to influence the course of events was sadly circumscribed by his failing health and his remoteness from the main theatre of action – Moscow. His last writings were the product of this resolve. And much of what he wrote – or dictated to his secretary – was done by actually cheating his doctors, who were trying to enforce a strict no-work regimen on their very sick patient.

It is undeniable that Lenin’s last writings achieved little in the immediate context of Soviet affairs. This was chiefly because the leadership of the Russian Communist Party was persuaded by Stalin to suppress the potentially most incendiary parts of what Lenin wrote in his last months. The articles that were made public – a few of them, though, with significant time-lags – were not widely disseminated or discussed, either.

And even those leaders who were not invested in Stalin’s project of smothering the dying man’s words either thought these writings were somewhat quixotic, or that following up on them could seriously threaten the Party’s unity at that point. They no doubt hoped that some of the problems Lenin had flagged in these pieces would be straightened out over time. Later events, of course, showed how wrong these optimists had been, how misplaced their hopes. These events also showed that the Russian Revolution’s only road to salvation lay in embracing the spirit, and the essence, of Lenin’s last writings. There is a school of liberal thought which proclaims Stalin as Lenin’s legitimate and natural successor. Lenin’s last writings give the definitive lie to that averment.

Anjan Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com.