Martin Amis - Koba the Dread

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to come out and say openly that famine would have numerous positive results… Famine, he explained, in destroying the outdated peasant economy, would… usher in socialism… Famine would also destroy faith not only in the tsar, but in God too.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

It has often been said that the Bolsheviks ruled as if conducting a war against their own people. [8] This made sense doctrinally, too. The Bolsheviks were internationalists; the Soviet Union was no more than the headquarters of Communism while it waited for planetary revolution. As he advanced on Warsaw in July 1920, Marshal Tukhachevsky repeated the official line: ‘Over the corpse of White Poland lies the path to world conflagration.’ (After the Red Army – largely thanks, it seems, to Stalin – was defeated, the Bolsheviks began to suspect that the fraternal revolutions weren’t going to materialize.) As for the Russians themselves, Lenin was frankly racist in his settled dislike for them. They were fools and bunglers, and ‘too soft’ to run an efficient police state. He made no secret of his preference for the Germans. 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.

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] Though very tardily: the future US president Herbert Hoover had been agitating for a food campaign in the USSR since 1919. Lenin also continued to export grain throughout this period (and continued, of course, to commit vast sums to the fomentation of revolutions elsewhere). 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…

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.

Unlike Stalin, Lenin could plead mitigation – though, like Stalin, he would not have so pleaded. [10] ‘There is no hint in any of the vast array of archival material to suggest that [Lenin] was troubled by his conscience about any of the long list of destructive measures he took’ (Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography ). ‘Nothing in the notes, remarks and resolutions of [Stalin’s] last years suggests anything but unfailing confidence that his life’s work was eternal’ (Volkogonov, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire ). 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 the 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’.

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] Which the Provisional Government under Kerensky had reinstated as a punishment for front-line desertion. The Bolsheviks had earlier campaigned with the slogan, ‘Down with capital punishment, reinstated by Kerensky.’ ‘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] Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924 .