Wesson - Lenins Legacy

HISTORIES OF RULING COMMUNIST PARTIES

Richard F. Staar, editor

Korean Workers Party: A Short History, Chong-Sik Lee

History of Vietnamese Communism, 1925-1976, Douglas Pike

Lenins Legacy: The Story of the CPSU, Robert G. Wesson

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Hoover Institution Press Publication No. 192

Hoover Institution at Leland Stanford Junior University,

Stanford, California 94305-6003

Copyright 2017 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University

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First printing 1978

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ISBN-13: 978-0-8179-6922-6 (paper)

C HAPTER 1
The Russian Discontent

C HAPTER 2
Lenins Party: Formation and Waiting

C HAPTER 3
The Conquest of Power

C HAPTER 4
The Liquidation of Dissent

C HAPTER 5
Stalinism in Power

C HAPTER 6
The Khrushchev Era

C HAPTER 7
Brezhnev and Conservative Communism

This is the third book in a series on the histories of the sixteen ruling communist parties from their organization to the present time. The studies were initiated to fill an important gap in the modern English-language historiography on communism in Albania, Bulgaria, Cambodia, China, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, (East) Germany, Hungary, (North) Korea, Laos, Mongolia, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union, Vietnam, and Yugoslavia.

This particular volume in the series covers the following aspects of the ruling party in the Soviet Union:

• Social and political background of the revolutionary movement in Russia.
• Founding of the Leninist party, its early struggles, important personalities, polemics, and difficulties.
• Accession to power because of special conditions toward the end of World War I.
• Development of the party from a revolutionary to a governing organization in and after the civil war.
• Stalinist succession; transformation and purge of the party under Stalin.
• The party as an instrument of totalitarian rule, 19301953.
• Succession after Stalin; the Khrushchev interlude of de-Stalinization and qualified liberalization.
• Stabilization of party rule under Brezhnevs leadership, problems in the late 1970s, with an overview of the role and nature of the CPSU, and its relationship to the world communist movement.

As general editor of this series, I am pleased that such a distinguished scholar as Professor Robert G. Wesson accepted our invitation to prepare this monograph.

R ICHARD F. S TAAR

Coordinator of International Studies

Hoover Institution

Stanford University

The Russian Revolution, the interwar period wracked by the struggles between conflicting ideologies, the passions of the Second World War, and the following cold war lose the vividness of living memory with the passing years. As distance grows, the rise of Bolshevism and the Soviet experiment gain clarity, or become less obscure, against the broad horizons of history. It has become easier to see through some of the mystification and to view the party of Lenin, its seizure of power in the worlds largest state, and the subsequent dramatic events in objective focus. The onetime fiery revolutionary state has settled down to sedate maturity, and our view of it should likewise be on the way to settling down.

Detachment is still difficult, because the Soviet state and the Communist movement still base their legitimacy to a large extent on their idealized interpretation of the rise of Lenins party. But at the distance of sixty years the Russian Revolution has lost much of its apocalyptic aura, diabolical or saintly; we can now see it as it has always been in reality, an episode of Russian history, an eruption not of wholly new forces but of old forces in new shapes, not a total overthrow and renewal but a remaking of the Russian polity under the impact of modernization and the strains of maladjustment and war, a result of the long-term abrasive interaction of Russia and the West. The new Russia has always contained much of the old Russia, and Lenins men were Russian revolutionaries far more than they were Marxist radicals. This obvious but frequently neglected fact forces itself ever more strongly on the student as the postrevolutionary government, with its fondness for stability, its modest growth rate, flagging technology, discontented intellectuals, and reliance on pressure more than terror, comes to look more like the prerevolutionary state.

It is consequently appropriate at this time to take a new look at the Leninist party as it rose from a minor radical movement torn by factional squabbles to a governing power, presided over the remaking and industrialization of Russia, fought its way to victory in Russias greatest war, and accommodated to stability. On the one hand, the present history continues the story from where the able accounts of such scholars as Leonard Schapiro and John S. Reshetar, Jr., left it some years ago to cover the Brezhnev period. On the other hand, the perspective of the present day seems to require some shifts of emphasis. This work offers no new discoveries but sees many things differently from previous depictions.

Much is still mysterious, largely because those in a position to publish the truth have frequently preferred persuasion to objectivity, and because one can make only surmises about many important matters. But the story that emerges is a tremendous dark epic, a tale of magnificent achievement and horrible suffering, of nobility and crime; to convey its dramatic grandeur requires the sweep of a Tolstoy plus the psychological insight of a Dostoyevsky. It is of a piece with Russian history, in which the vast success of four hundred years of empire building was shadowed by the sufferings of the people and the misdeeds of the rulers. Peter not only built monumentally but murdered on a scale almost worthy of Stalin, and the shiny new capital of St. Petersburg cost the lives of tens of thousands of serfs. Whether under tsars or general secretaries, Russia has never been a land of moderation.