CHAPTER 4
MARCH 1917 - MARCH 1921:
LENIN AND THE PROBLEM OF BUILDING SOCIALISM
The importance for Stalin—and for his thinking about Lenin—of the issue of
building socialism in Russia can scarcely be overestimated. It was Lenin’s radical
concept of the revolution and especially his singular vision that the revolution would
1
proceed “to the achievement of a democratic republic … and then to socialism” that won
him a measure of renewed respect from Stalin in March and April 1917. When Stalin and
his fellow Russian socialists were trying to take their bearings after the sudden collapse of
tsarism, Lenin’s bold proclamation from distant Zurich gave radically inclined Bolsheviks
a direction and a goal. That Stalin, despite the negative political and personal judgments
of Lenin he had drawn from his experiences with him before 1917, joined Lenin’s
campaign to make a socialist revolution in Russia testifies to the powerful attraction that
Lenin’s idea had for him. The vigor and determination with which the fiery Lenin fought to
win acceptance of his views within the Party doubtless also appealed to Stalin. Though
significant differences about tactics remained between them, Stalin’s acceptance (or
toleration) of Lenin’s leadership indicates the paramount importance of the direction Lenin
provided. But by June and certainly by July, Lenin’s retreat from militancy had eroded
much of his standing with Stalin. And, as Lenin’s erratic tactics exhausted Stalin’s
patience, by October Stalin figuratively consigned Lenin “to the archives.”
2
After October 1917 perhaps the only aspect of Lenin’s leadership for which Stalin
might have had some measure of respect was his continuing commitment to pursue class
warfare and to transform Russia into a socialist society. But as we have seen, his
commitment began to weaken as early as December 1919, and it waned steadily
throughout 1920. By early 1921 a desperate Lenin was instituting a substantial restoration
of capitalism. Stalin reacted to this extremity in an extreme manner, but before we
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2
examine Stalin’s response we need to take a fuller look at the process by which Lenin’s
thinking about building socialism changed.
Lenin’s call for a socialist revolution in backward Russia had departed so radically
from Marxist orthodoxy that it initially stunned most of his fellow Russian Social
Democrats. Marx had taught that societies advance by passing through a sequence of
necessary stages of historical development; accordingly, the prevailing wisdom was that
agrarian Russian, just emerging from tsarist feudalism, would have to experience a
prolonged period of bourgeois rule and capitalist industrialization before becoming ready
for socialism. Lenin’s moderate Menshevik opponents and even many Bolsheviks
believed that any attempt to carry out a socialist revolution in Russia was premature,
3
destined to fail, and harmful to the long-term interests of democratic socialism. But
Lenin, determined to press on toward socialism, charged that his critics wanted “to
sacrifice living Marxism to the dead letter.” Because of the world war, events had
outpaced all predictions, presenting unique and unforeseeable opportunities to advance
the cause of socialism, Lenin argued, and seizing these required ideological creativity.
The victory of a workers’ revolution in Russia, he promised, would accelerate the revolt of
the international proletariat which, in its turn, would assist the Russian workers, as would
the “semi-proletarian” peasant masses of Russia. Lenin believed that with these allies the
Russian working class could achieve that which it was not yet strong enough to achieve
alone: it could build socialism.
4
Believing that a proletarian revolution and the creation of a communal state “for
the purpose of the transition to socialism” was “the only way out” of Russia’s desperate
situation, Lenin charged in April 1917 that his critics “have deserted socialism, have
betrayed socialism, and have gone over to” the bourgeois class enemy. Such intolerance
was typical of him. In September, for example, he attacked as “pseudo-Marxist lackeys of
the bourgeoisie” those who “say that we are not ripe for socialism, that it is too early to
‘introduce’ socialism.” Claiming that “anyone who understands” Marxist theory “is bound
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3
to admit that there can be no advance except toward socialism,” Lenin asserted that those
who “fear to advance toward socialism” “cannot be revolutionary democrats in the
twentieth century.” A fortnight before the October Revolution his voice became shriller
still: “the fear of marching toward socialism,” he declared, was “the most contemptible
treason to the cause of the proletariat.”
5
Of Lenin’s determination to build a socialist
society there could be no doubt.
Through struggle and perseverance Lenin won endorsement of his radical vision
in August 1917 by the Bolshevik Sixth Party Congress, which resolved that revolutionary
elements in Russia should “devote all efforts to taking state power into their own hands
and to guiding the state, in alliance with the revolutionary proletariat of the advanced
6
countries, toward peace and the socialist reconstruction of society.” But the point was
unclear: could Russia go forward merely hoping for Western assistance, or could it go
forward only if it received Western aid? Absent from the Congress, Lenin did not address
the issue, and in the months ahead he offered no clarification. On the morning after the
seizure of power, for example, he voiced his intention to “advance firmly toward
socialism” based on the ambiguous assumption “that the proletariat of the West European
countries will help us to achieve a complete and lasting victory for the cause of
socialism.”
7
Conditions for achieving a “complete and lasting victory” were not the issue
in 1917; whether Russia, on her own, could start to build socialism was. Looking back on
1917 two years later, Lenin was still vague:
Both prior to October and during the October Revolution, we always said
that we regard ourselves and can only regard ourselves as one of the
contingents of the international proletarian army, a contingent that came to
the fore, not because of its level of development and preparedness, but
because of Russia’s exceptional conditions; we always said that the victory
of the socialist revolution, therefore, can only be regarded as final when it
becomes the victory of the proletariat in at least several advanced
countries … Our banking on world revolution, if you could call it that, has
8
on the whole been fully justified.
How “banking on world revolution” could be regarded as “fully justified” when the elusive
world revolution became every day a more remote prospect is a mystery, and Lenin’s
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4
tortured reasoning in defense of his policy reveals his continuing inability to face the
ambiguity that was at its heart. Nonetheless, Lenin’s words do confirm that he had been
“banking on world revolution.”
At the Sixth Party Congress Stalin voiced a simpler confidence in the possibility
“that Russia will be the country that will lay the road to socialism,” invoking “creative
Marxism” to buttress his belief.
9
Lenin’s intention to transform society was apparent also in his call, made upon his
return to Russia in April 1917, for a new Party Program to replace the outdated document
of 1903 and for his followers to take the name “Communist” in order to distinguish
themselves from Social Democrats who supported the policies of the Provisional
Government.
10
But not until March 1918 was a new name—the Russian Communist Party
(bolsheviks), or RCP(b)—chosen. For a new Party program, Lenin had to wait still another
year.
A new Party Program was finally adopted in March 1919 at the Eighth Party
Congress. Based on Lenin’s proposals, the new Program affirmed the goal of building
socialism, sanctified measures already taken “in the initial stages of the transition from
capitalism to communism,” and mapped out further steps toward the ultimate goal. The
expropriation of the urban bourgeoisie, already well advanced, was to be completed and a
“socialized industry” established. “Equal remuneration of labor” was endorsed as a major
aim, though it was not yet feasible primarily because of the need for bourgeois technical
experts. In the countryside, where private property in land had been abolished
immediately after the October Revolution, efforts to organize a “large-scale socialist
agriculture” should continue, as should the “resolute struggle” against the rural
bourgeoisie. The new Program ratified efforts already underway to replace all private
trade with a single nationwide distribution network of consumers’ cooperatives and to
expand the sphere of non-monetary exchange, though the complete abolition of money
remained in the future. Despite the need for some half-measures, the progress already
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5
made in transforming Russia reassured the Party to continue the march toward “full
communism.”
11
Acting on the belief that the socialist economic order must be rational, the Eighth
Party Congress further resolved that “the consolidation of all economic activity in the
country according to a general state plan” was “one of the most fundamental tasks” in the
building of socialism.
12
Lenin himself was a strong proponent of central planning of
economic life and of a single plan in particular.
13
Nevertheless, little progress toward a
comprehensive plan had been made by February 1920, when the highest administrative
organ of the Soviet government, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK),
directed that “a nationwide state economic plan on scientific lines” be drawn up and
implemented. An agency known as GOELRO (the acronym for the State Commission for
the Electrification of Russia) was established to develop the plan.
14
Electrification was
chosen as the focus of the planning effort because it would have the greatest and most
immediate benefit in stimulating growth and modernization in all areas of Russian
economic life. When GOELRO presented its draft plan in December 1920, Lenin praised it
to the Eighth Congress of Soviets as placing Russia “on the real economic basis required
for communism” and even called it “the second Program of our Party.”
15
The Congress
approved the plan and authorized the VTsIK to move promptly toward implementing it.
16
Though adoption of the GOELRO plan might have seemed a great step forward in
the advance toward communism, it was in fact the high-water mark of that campaign. Just
a few days before Lenin lavishly praised the electrification proposal, he had taken steps
down a different road, one which would soon lead to shelving the GOELRO plan and,
indeed, to postponing the whole struggle to build socialism. Lenin was beginning to
execute what Stalin later would call “an abrupt turn” away from the Party’s “policy of the
offensive” and toward restoring capitalism, a turn so abrupt that it could have split the
Party.
17
It was a turn that Lenin felt he had to make to save his regime from disaster.
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6
From the outset, the attempt to transform Russia was severely handicapped,
perhaps even doomed. The Bolsheviks were trying to build socialism, after all, in an
economic disaster area: a developing country hammered by almost seven years of world
war, foreign invasions, and civil war. Russia’s narrow industrial base, fragile
transportation system, and quaint agriculture had been unable to stand up under the
demands of the war with Germany and were exhausted when the Bolsheviks took power.
Serious shortages of food, fuel, locomotives, goods and materiel of all sorts, and labor,
both in the factories and in the fields, crippled the country. To these problems the
Bolsheviks, by alienating the middle class, added another: a shortage of managers and
technical experts. In the countryside, the break-up during the revolutionary year of large
landed estates into less efficient peasant small-holdings further undercut food production.
Two and half additional years of particularly brutal and destructive civil war turned
exhaustion into collapse and brought Russia to the brink of famine.
Because of the urgent need for food and because the country which the
Bolsheviks were trying to transform was overwhelmingly agrarian, the most important
element of Soviet economic policy in 1918-1921 concerned the procurement of grain and
other foodstuffs. The communist approach, commonly called requisitioning, was to
require peasants to sell to the state at fixed prices all produce above a level determined by
the state to be necessary for subsistence. Food hoarded by peasants was confiscated by
squads of workers and poor peasants. Ideally, peasants would be able to buy
manufactured goods with the paper money they were paid for the grain they were forced
to sell to the state. But with industry and transport near collapse, scarcely any consumer
goods flowed to the countryside. Consequently, the money received by the peasants had
little real value, and peasants had correspondingly little incentive to produce the surplus
foodstuffs which the society so badly needed. With peasants increasingly choosing to
grow only what they needed to sustain themselves, the economic base of the regime
eroded and food shortages became ever more severe.
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18
7
Failure to deal effectively with Russia’s economic troubles had helped to bring
down first the tsarist and then the Provisional governments in 1917, and Lenin believed
that the Bolsheviks too would fall if they did not solve the food and peasant problems.
Speaking in December 1920 at the Eighth Congress of Soviets, he admitted that Russia
was still a country of peasants whose minds were filled with selfish capitalist notions.
This widespread peasant mentality created “a firmer basis for capitalism in Russia than for
communism,” he said, and it gave “the internal enemy” a stronger foundation than the
Bolsheviks themselves possessed. The only way to undermine capitalism, stressed
Lenin, was to electrify the country, eventually placing the whole economy, including
agriculture, “on the technical basis of modern large-scale industry.” Electrification,
however, would require substantial resources and would take at least a decade.
19
But the Bolsheviks did not have a decade. The failure of food procurement policy
increasingly imperiled the Soviet regime and forced it to change course drastically.
Through the latter half of 1920 peasant unrest turned more and more into violence: in over
a dozen provinces the authorities were unable to collect grain. The agricultural crisis
called into question the loyalty of millions of Red Army soldiers of peasant origin, and
even among proletarians discontent was spreading, as manifested in early 1921 by strikes
and demonstrations against Bolshevik policies by starving workers in Petrograd. The
growth of disaffection within the regime’s social base was confirmed by the admission by
Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the head of the secret police, that more workers and peasants than
bourgeois class enemies filled the jails.
20
By February Lenin acknowledged that the
situation was so “desperate and downright dangerous” that it obliged the government to
make concessions to the peasantry.
21
That requisitioning, by depriving the peasants of incentives to work and produce,
was harmful to the interests of the Soviet regime had been recognized a year earlier, in
February 1920, by the People’s Commissar for War, Trotsky, who called for relaxing
requisitioning and allowing a measure of economic freedom. Trotsky’s proposal was
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8
rejected, however, by a majority of the Central Committee, including Lenin, who continued
to believe that the state grain monopoly was essential to the success of the socialist
revolution.
22
Freedom to trade, Lenin preached again and again, was the seedbed of
capitalism; it meant freedom for the rich to exploit the poor, and it would inexorably lead
to the “dissolution of the alliance of the peasants and the workers” and to the “return of
undivided power to the landowners and capitalists.” Because he believed that free trade
would allow grain hoarders “to enslave the workers,” Lenin insisted that the attitude of
Communists toward petty-bourgeois elements who called for free trade “must be one of
war.” Communists who favored free trade he branded “fools and traitors.”
23
But even as Lenin railed against advocates of free trade, he was beginning to
soften his position on the treatment of class enemies. As we have already noted, he
showed unproletarian sympathy for bourgeois specialists as early as in late 1919, and by
early 1920 he was publicly questioning the value of coercion against the peasants and
acknowledging their “legitimate rights” to a fair return on their labor.
24
By November 1920
the shift in his thinking was nearly complete. At his prompting, the Council of People’s
Commissars established a commission to consider instituting a tax in kind to replace
requisitioning.
25
Despite Lenin’s authority, the idea of ending requisitioning still
encountered stiff opposition within the Soviet hierarchy; as late as February 1921
opposition was apparently substantial enough that Lenin was trying to sell his proposed
reform as an experiment for a limited time.
26
It was probably only the rebellion early in
March of the sailors of the Baltic Fleet and the Kronstadt naval base near Petrograd—
sailors who had been key supporters of the Bolsheviks in 1917—that persuaded a majority
of Party leaders of the political necessity of abandoning requisitioning.
The momentous and “abrupt shift” to the right in Soviet policy finally came at the
Tenth Party Congress, which convened in Moscow even while the Kronstadt revolt
raged.
27
On Lenin’s motion, the Congress on March 15
28
scrapped requisitioning in favor
of a tax in kind structured to stimulate agricultural production. After paying the tax,
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9
peasants would be able to sell their remaining product on the free market. Rural trade
would be revived by an influx of manufactured goods to be acquired from abroad with the
proceeds of large foreign loans Lenin hoped to receive.
29
Though Lenin’s remarks dealt
almost exclusively with the countryside, a passing admission that “we overdid the
nationalization of industry and trade” hinted at a broader restoration of capitalism.
30
By
early summer, in fact, private enterprise was reviving in the cities, and the regime was
leasing some nationalized enterprises back to their former owners. The government still
controlled the “commanding heights” of the economy—banking, large-scale industry,
transport, and foreign trade—but Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP), as the concessions
to private enterprise came to be known, halted the march toward communism and
reinstituted a substantial measure of capitalism.
31
Lenin justified his proposal by arguing straightforwardly that his new course was
essential if the Bolsheviks were to retain power. Because the assistance from the
European proletariat on which he had counted had failed to materialize, Lenin insisted that
Russia’s economic exhaustion left the Communist regime no choice but to seek help from
capitalists and, above all, from the peasantry. So vital was peasant support, he admitted
frankly, that it would be “impossible … to preserve the rule of the proletariat in Russia”
were free trade not restored.
32
This was a sober and realistic conclusion.
But it was not a conclusion that Lenin could square with Party principle. Though
he acknowledged that policy must be based on principle,
33
he could not find the
communist principle that legitimized building capitalism. Indeed, admitting that elements
of his proposal violated the Party Program, he placed the blame on the Program, which he
declared “unsound in practice.”
34
Evidently Lenin had forgotten that he had written most
of the Program. Lenin compounded this attack on the Party’s basic statement of aims and
principles by criticizing those Communists who had believed that Russia could be
transformed in three years; they were, he said, “dreamers.”
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35
For good measure, he
10
denounced those who were suspicious of his rapprochement with capitalism or who
“sneered” at his proposals as “either bureaucratic or just irresponsible.”
36
In answering a series of his own rhetorical questions, Lenin tacitly admitted that
his proposal conflicted with Party principle. “How can a Communist Party recognize
freedom of trade and accept it? Doesn’t the proposition contain irreconcilable
contradictions? What does it mean,” he asked, “what limits are there to this exchange,
how is it all to be implemented?” His response was no answer at all: “Anyone who
expects to get an answer at this Congress,” he advised, “will be disappointed.” The
answer would be forthcoming in legislation yet to be written but it would be the right
answer, Lenin implied, because “our Party is the governmental party and the decision of
the Party Congress will be binding on the entire Republic.” In other words, power—not
conformity with socialist principle—would legitimize the new policy. Indeed, Lenin
seemed to be far more concerned with pragmatic considerations, such as the need to ram
his proposal through the Congress before the peasants began their spring planting, than
with issues of principle.
37
Lenin tried to mask the extent of his departure from Party principle by claiming
that the policies he was scrapping had not really been aimed at building socialism at all
but were only expedients “with which we were saddled by the imperative conditions of
wartime.”
38
Though he occasionally lapsed—as on March 16 in his concluding remarks to
the Congress when he admitted that “we have been working for several years now to lay,
39
for the first time in history, the foundations of a socialist society” —in the main he stuck
to the story that past policies, which he soon dubbed “War Communism,” had been meant
only to enable the regime to withstand the assaults of counter-revolutionary and foreign
armies.
40
This convenient historical fiction allowed Lenin to argue that the wartime
policies of 1918-1921 had been rendered obsolete by the coming of peace and hence that
new approaches were needed. It also allowed him to insinuate that the tax-in-kind
concept, which had been embodied in an abortive law in 1918, was more truly
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11
representative of the Party’s unfettered thought on the peasant problem than the allegedly
aberrant practice of requisitioning.
41
Thus Lenin could defend the retreat from socialist
construction to capitalism on the ground that there really was no retreat at all—just a
return to a sound, peacetime approach to economic recovery which wartime conditions
had forced the Party temporarily to shelve. This useful fiction helped Lenin save political
face.
For the embarrassment Lenin was struggling to avoid there was ample warrant. In
1917 his moderate socialist critics had warned him that Russia was not yet ready for
socialist revolution and that the attempt to force one would lead to disaster. Though Lenin
acknowledged that the Russian proletariat was too weak alone to build socialism, he
forged ahead anyway, confident that this weakness would be offset by aid from fraternal
revolutionary regimes in Europe and from the “semi-proletarian” Russian peasantry. After
the October Revolution, the Mensheviks continued to urge the Communists to moderate
their policies. In particular, in their Party Program of 1919 and at the Eighth Congress of
Soviets in December 1920 the Mensheviks recommended replacing requisitioning with free
trade.
42
Lenin dismissed these suggestions, however, as attempts by “accomplices of
international imperialism” to lead the peasantry astray into the camp of counterrevolution.
43
But after three years of trying to build socialism, Lenin had to back down and
adopt as his own some of the proposals of these “accomplices of international
imperialism.” Without help from the allies on whom he had banked, Lenin finally had to
face the fact that the Russian proletariat was indeed too weak to build socialism. To avoid
the fate of previous regimes, the Bolsheviks had to have peasant backing, and Lenin
believed it could be obtained only by partially restoring free trade—even though, as he
acknowledged at the Tenth Party Congress, this was advocated also by the “petty
bourgeois counter-revolution.” Little wonder, then, as he admitted, that his new policies
occasioned some Muscovites to “sneer” and to say, “See what communism has come
to!”
44
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12
1
LCW, 23:297-308 (Lenin’s emphasis).
2
On Stalin and Lenin in 1917 see Momos and the Mountain Eagle, chapters 8-16.
3
On the Mensheviks’ views, see Leopold Haimson, The Mensheviks (Chicago, 1974), 1519, 34-35.
4
LCW, 23:299, 307-8, 330; 24:42-54.
5
LCW, 24:69, 97; 25:360-61; 26:172 (Lenin’s emphases).
6
RDCPSU, 1:254-55.
7
LCW, 26:241-42.
8
LCW, 30:207-8.
9
See Momos and the Mountain Eagle, chapter 13 .
10
LCW, 24:24. The 1903 Party Program is at RDCPSU, 1:39-45.
11
The 1919 Party Program is at RDCPSU, 2:54-73.
12
RDCPSU, 2:65.
13
See LCW, 27:90-91, 408, and 25:234, 427.
14
On GOELRO, see Edward Hallett Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, 3 vols. (New
York, 1950-1953), 2:371-73, and Silvana Malle, The Economic Organization of War
Communism 1918-1921 (Cambridge, 1985), 313-14. The VTsIK resolution is quoted from
the extract in LCW, 32:138. In April 1919 the Ninth Party Congress seconded the call for a
comprehensive national plan based on electrification.
15
LCW, 31:514-15.
16
LCW, 31:532-33.
17
SW, 5:224-25.
18
See Lars T. Lih, “Bolshevik Razverstka and War Communism,” Slavic Review 45 (1986),
673-88; Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, 2:147-72; and Malle, 322-457.
19
LCW, 31:515-16.
20
Leggett, 329.
21
LCW, 45:89.
22
Leon Trotsky, My Life. An Attempt at an Autobiography (New York, 1970), 463-64; Carr,
Bolshevik Revolution, 2:280; and Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed. Trotsky, 18791921 (New York, 1954), 496-97.
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13
23
Quotations are from statements on June 23, 1919 and March 6, 1920, in LCW, 29:378-80
and 30:412-13, respectively. See also 27:454; 28:142-43, 171-76, 340-45; 29:46, 77, 521-24,
567-70; 30:109-110, 135-36, 145-49, 183-84, and 237-38.
24
Lenin referred to the peasants’ “legitimate rights” in February 1920 (LCW, 30:377).
25
LCW, 42:230; Malle, 451.
26
LCW, 45:90; Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 2
York, 1971), 211.
nd
ed. (New
27
See Lenin’s speeches at the Congress in LCW, 32:167-271; the resolution on the Tax in
Kind in RDCPSU, 2:129-30; and the discussion by Paul Craig Roberts, “’War Communism’:
A Re-examination,” Slavic Review 29 (1970), 238-61.
28
March 15 was the anniversary of Lenin’s speech to the Water Transport Workers’ Union,
as Stalin probably noted.
29
LCW, 32:222-23.
30
LCW, 32:219.
31
On the introduction of the NEP see Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, 2:280-359.
32
LCW, 32:224-25, 215.
33
LCW, 32:218-20.
34
LCW, 32:224.
35
LCW, 32:216-17.
36
LCW, 32:223-24.
37
LCW, 32:218-19.
38
LCW, 32:187 (also 189, 219-20, 233-34).
39
LCW, 32:265.
40
See especially Lenin’s April 1921 pamphlet, “The Tax in Kind,” in which he first used the
term, “War Communism” (LCW, 32:342-43).
41
LCW, 32:187-89.
42
Haimson, 237-38, and Abraham Ascher, The Mensheviks in the Russian Revolution
(Ithaca, 1976), 113-14.
43
LCW, 30:412-13, and 31:519.
44
LCW, 32:185, 223.
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