To what extent can Lenin be considered the begetter of Stalinism? Frank Carson - 4002/10512

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To what extent can Lenin be considered the begetter of Stalinism?

Frank Carson – 4002/10512

2 836 words

In order to establish whether Lenin did, indeed beget Stalinism, two questions need to be answered; what were Lenin’s plans for the future of Russia and what exactly gave rise to Stalinism? Official Soviet historians of the time at which Stalin was in power would have argued that each one answers the other. Similarly, Western historians saw Lenin as an important figure in the establishment of Stalin’s socialist state. This can be partly attributed to the prevailing current of pro-Stalin anti-Hitler sentiments amongst westerners until the outbreak of the cold war. As relations changed between Russia and the rest of the world, so did the main historical schools of thought. Following Stalins death, hostilities between the capitalist powers and the USSR, along with an increased awareness of the atrocities that were previously hidden and ignored, led to a split in the opinions of Soviet and Western Liberal historians. In Russia, he was seen, as Trotsky had always maintained, as a betrayer of the revolution, therefore as much distance as possible was placed between himself and Lenin in the schoolbooks of the 50s and early 60s in the USSR. These historians point to Stalin’s killing of fellow communists as a marked difference between himself and his predecessor. Trotsky himself remarked that ‘The present purge draws between Bolshevism and Stalinism… a whole river of blood’. Liberal Western historians such as Richard Pipes, who himself was an advisor to President Reagan, drew lines of direct continuity between the two leaders, emphasising Lenin’s use of terror and bans on factionalism which allowed Stalin to come to power. The confined nature of information available to historians both in and out of Russia allowed these polarised views to be perpetuated, however the dissolution of the communist regime in Russia and Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glastnost’ precipitated the emergence of a revisionist school of thought. The detachment from the Cold War politics that pervaded the study of Lenin and Stalinism and increased access to source material previously hidden has created a more objective viewpoint that almost mediates between Soviet and right wing Western historians, both identifying changes and lines of continuity. One such historian writes ‘Excesses were the essence of historical Stalinism, and they are what really require explanation’. Identified here is the fact that many of the ideas and practices seen under Lenin were continued and most importantly, developed by Stalin. His personality, even Pipes admits, sets him apart from Lenin and goes some way towards explaining the frequent examples of what Stalin would have called ‘Leninist’ ideologies and acts taken to a new level.

One such example is the use of terror. Right wing western historians often emphasise the importance of the fact that it was under Lenin that terror was first used. Even Sheila Fitzpatrick, a noted revisionist, points out that the genesis of the Purges carried out by Stalin in the 30s lay in the ‘periodic cleansing’ of the party practiced in the early 20s, in which every member of the party was made to justify himself before a purge commission and defend against criticisms delivered openly from the floor or in secret, by denunciation. Parallels can be drawn between Stalin’s use of the secret police against Trotskyists and similar treatment of Mensheviks by Lenin in 1922 (both Menshevik leaders and Trotsky himself were expelled from the country). Soviet historians would remind us, however, that Stalin later ordered the exiled Trotsky’s assassination, a move that would not have been made by Lenin. A converse break between the two leaders emerges here however, as Stalin’s purges in the 30’s rid the party of Lenin’s Bolshevik elite almost completely. Of the 1 966 party members who attended the XVIIth party congress, 1 108 were executed. Of significance also, however, is the fact that Lenin had few scruples about revolutionary terror and was ruthless with his people, as we see from Lenin’s instructions concerning the trial of a large number of bourgeois and clergymen in Shuia, which Lenin ordered must end ‘with the shooting of a very large number of the most influential and dangerous black hundreds of the city of Shuia. Maxim Gorky remarked perspicaciously that Lenin ‘treated workers as a miner treats ore’ and that Stalin was of the same mould. This identifies a further ideological similarity between the two men, in the common influence on their ideas of European secular thinkers such as Hegel and Kant, whose versions of Judeo-Christian ideas envisioned an inevitable paradise on earth. For Lenin and Stalin, the chosen people to inhabit their socialist utopia were the proletarians. This created a dichotomy of humanitarian thinking and ruthless and savage violence. For both Lenin and Stalin, anything was justifiable that pushed the revolution forward. Soviet historians who argue Stalin was a historical aberration in the rightful path of socialism, on the other hand, claim Stalin’s purges and terror were more to do with personal power and his paranoid megalomaniac personality than commitment to the revolution, for which Lenin was prepared to commit such atrocities (on a smaller scale). One must consider, however, the fact that these historians had little choice but to form a distinction between communism and Stalinism, in order to preserve the position of the USSR after Stalin’s death. The exception to this unflinching commitment, for Lenin, was the ‘killing of fellow communists’, which Pipes identifies as the single difference between Lenin and Stalin. Stalin’s Russian biographer, Dimitri Volkogonov, whose views on Stalinism, Lenin and even Marxism changed dramatically throughout the time at which he was writing, suggests Stalin’s terror had more roots in that of the Jacobins, who turned on their own in the French Revolution. Volkogonov’s arguments are given some credulity by the great extent to which he had access to Soviet archives. Some time after Stalin had come to power, the sharp line drawn between discipline within the party and that without, was blurred, the result being the Great Purges and the loss of millions of lives in the gulags in the 30s.

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Pipes compares Lenin’s influence over the party to that of the head of a secret order. He argues that Bolsheviks were coerced into following Lenin’s will and that his policy of democratic centralism, like many of the promises he made throughout his career, such as those in the build up to the ‘October coup’, were a sham. Sheila Fitzpatrick, a revisionist historian separated from the politics of the Cold War, with access to party documents previously unseen insists that on the whole, all Bolsheviks accepted democratic centralism. ‘Party members could freely debate issues before a policy decision was reached, but ...

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