Did Stalin betray the Russian Revolution? Essay Example

"indiscriminate killing machine"5. Another feature identified with Stalin's 'rule by fear' was the gulag penal system, established by Lenin and used for political opponents.

The central pillar of the dictatorship was the one party state; rival parties were banned such as the liberal Cadets, before the Bolsheviks became the only legal party. 'Democracy' as such in Russia lasted exactly one day, January 6, 1918 before the Constituent Assembly was shut down by force. The embarrassment of the Bolshevik party, self-proclaimed saviours of the masses, only winning a quarter of the masses' votes was clearly too great for Lenin.Lenin was not the faultless figure his supporters make him out to be. He did not just 'ditch common decency'2, he was a cruel man who would not tolerate dissent; his attack on 'factionalism' to stop animosity in the party was hypocritical considering that he was responsible for the Russian SDP's split into Bolshevik and Menshevik factions to begin with, in 1905. The response to the Krondstadt civil rebellion highlights Lenin's dictatorial tendencies; it was a protest against the harshness of Bolshevik rule, and it was put down by force.

Other examples of Lenin's less than perfect record are his control of the media introduction of limited capitalism to the country in the form of the New Economic Policy, discredited by Ball as the "New Exploitation of the Proletariat". It was a U-turn on both Marxism and Lenin's previous policy of 'war communism' and angered the left of the party. The NEP improved living conditions for the peasantry, and Lenin established a 'smychka'2 or alliance with them, but he was also responsible for identifying the 'kulak' class which

Stalin would later 'liquidate'. It must not be forgotten that Lenin 'liquidated' the Cossacks in what appeared to be a prototype of 'de-kulakisation'.

Lenin appeared to want to be in conflict with the majority of his people; it is clear he did not listen to their wishes. With the removal of the 'Dumas' from the political sphere there appeared to be less free speech than ever before.Josef Stalin was not the favoured successor to Lenin, and many historians have suggested that Leon Trotsky would have been a far better leader. However, both men were criticised in Lenin's testament.

Trotsky was not without fault - he was a harsh man, the commander of the Red Army who advocated the use of chemical weapons to suppress the Krondstadt rebellion. According to Mark Kramer he saw repression by the state as a pragmatic necessity, and there was no question of what Trotsky called "so-called morality"2.Nationalism was not a Marxist feature. Nor was it particularly one of Lenin's; he ignored Trotsky's protests and ordered the signing of the 1917 treaty of Brest-Litovsk, sacrificing vast swathes of his own country to Germany. Stalin, however, made his stance clear in his 'Mother Russia' speech of 1931. He took responsibility for the protection and advancement of a country which was not his own; he insisted that the country and communism itself would 'be crushed' by the western capitalist powers within ten years.

For Stalin, the only way to avoid this was to rapidly galvanise all resources available and bring about an industrial revolution, a 'revolution from above'. Unfortunately for the country concerned "you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs"7; these words

of Stalin's in his 1939 work 'A Critical Survey of Bolshevism" were perhaps an attempt at justifying his actions up to that date, and indeed a warning sign of what was to come.Siding with the hated fascist enemy in the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact was a prime example of Stalin's many diversions from political ideology in favour of pragmatic solutions. Sadly for Stalin and Russia's long-suffering peasantry, his trust in Hitler was misplaced and operation Barbarossa was launched in September 1941, too late in the year on the Nazis' part to avoid the treacherous Russian winter. It is ironic that Stalin took Hitler at his word while apparently distrusting the vast majority of the population of his own country and the entire outside world. The 'Great Patriotic War', itself a contradiction in terms as a Marxist leader has to discourage nationalism rather than encourage it if he is to call himself Marxist at all, saw more hypocritical actions on Stalin's part, not least the toleration of religion exclusively as a morale boost; this could only have been seen as heresy for the committed atheists Marx and Lenin.

This was little more than 'opium for the masses' in a time when they needed to forget the dual horror inflicted on them by the invaders and their own government.The most damning criticism of Stalin is not just that he was "corroding the soul of bolshevism", as Trotsky saw it, but that he was not furthering the revolution at all and in failing to do so his government was a counter-revolution. As Orwell pointed out in his book 'Animal Farm', certainly by the time of Stalin's death few people

could trust their memories of what life was like before the revolution as they had been told so many half-truths and lies. Those that spoke out, or just those who Stalin thought were likely to speak out, were silenced or had their stories disclaimed by the Stalinist media, always rewriting history in "the great Stalin school of falsification"4. Perhaps people just did not realise that after such a long time under a government which was supposed to be the polar opposite of the Romanov dynasty, their lives were ultimately no different.

Stalin in practice was no different from the Tsar Nicholas II calling the concept of life without authoritarian repression "senseless dreams"5. Even the tools that the tsars used were similar to Stalin's; the Ochrana and NKVD carried out much the same kind of persecution and terror, except that Stalin's NKVD was many times more severe. The Tsar's vocal lack of sympathy for the innocents who were massacred in a protest on Bloody Sunday in 1905 pales in comparison with Stalin's astonishing lack of sympathy or action for a perpetually poor and starving nation. While the Tsar lived in the opulence of the Winter Palace, Stalin was widely held to be living a modest life; paradoxically the only part of Marxist doctrine he did not seem to twist to suit himself. Yet both had state protection and bodyguards, Stalin with poison tasters and cars with three-inch thick bullet proof windows5. He was certainly playing a Machiavellian game in politics and was clearly concerned about suffering the same fate as his rivals.

Alternatively his protection could be seen as just a symbol of his intense paranoia

which had been with him since his deprived childhood3.Stalinism could be excused as just an attempt to secure isolated Russia's place in a hostile world, with 'Socialism In One Country' being the only way in which there could be any socialism at all at a time when Trotsky's 'Permanent Revolution' was looking like a na�ve dream. However, this is repulsive to Marxist doctrine and arguably the least Marxist aspect of Stalin's leadership was his lack of interest in spreading the workers' revolution. Even after Communism had been made secure in the USSR, he showed no interest in spreading it. Communist victories internationally owed little or nothing to him or his government, notably Mao Zedong's 'People's Republic' of China in 1949.

At the Yalta conference he refused to support the Greek Communist party, thereby letting it disintegrate and with it the chances of infiltrating Western Europe's 'Iron Curtain'. Those who criticised Stalin's isolationist policy were accused of being enemies of the state, or 'Trotskyists' - despite Trotsky, like Lenin, never having claimed to follow his own brand of Marxism. Indeed, the 'Permanent Revolution' which he advocated adhered far more closely to the Marxist ideal than Stalin's apparently odd concept of 'Socialism In One Country'. Yet these 'Trotskyists' - in reality a loosely applied catch-all label for anyone deemed dangerous or irritating to Stalin - became via the media evil opponents of the revolution. At the same time Stalin made his own form of government inseparable in the public eye from Leninism, appearing alongside him not only in posters but also ultimately in death, in the Lenin Mausoleum.

It could be said that in many ways Stalin 'personalised'

the USSR. Weight of evidence suggests strongly that he had a cold personality and was intensely paranoid. These were political tools for Stalin; they helped create an unassailable position for him as supreme leader of the USSR, a climate of relentless fear under the shadow of his secret police, and what Nikita Khrushchev later identified as a 'cult of the personality'. These were elements of the monolithic power base which was the antithesis of everything Marx envisaged.

Yet everything Stalin did in power was justified by reference to Marxist-Leninist doctrine. It was ironic that the Communist movement had become so dependent on one man in spite of its doctrine, which warned against putting faith in a leader, and its name, which emphasised the will of the 'community'.Lenin justified the revolution by claiming it would be the 'spark' which would ignite the workers of the rest of the world, but the country was clearly not ready for revolution by Marx's standards - in "a country of one hundred million peasants and five million proletarians", Bolshevism was no mass movement. In this way it can be claimed that Lenin not only betrayed the revolution through his dictatorial tendencies, he also misjudged Marx to the point of betrayal.

The attempt to turn a pre-industrial country into a Communist power while bypassing the necessary middle stage of capitalism eventually turned out to be such a failure that he "consigned Marxism to the historical scrapheap"5.Lenin betrayed Marxism by bringing about a revolution in the wrong country at the wrong point in its development, and also betrayed the revolution itself with his tools of manipulation and terror. Stalin betrayed any common

decency Lenin may have kept and used the system inherited from him to terrorise his people for his own security. If Marx and Engels would have tolerated such extreme deviation in order to sustain the workers' revolution in the long term, then Stalin was acting in the best interests of the USSR. However, taking into account the fact that Marx and Engels foresaw Communism as a 'utopia', it was not in reality even a 'dictatorship of the proletariat' in any shape or form, since the people had no say in how their lives were run under Lenin or Stalin. Even by the time of Brezhnev's death 27 years after Stalin's, the basis of a society which punished 'senseless dreams' with persecution, death or a spell in a prison camp was still in place.

The theoretical difference between Tsarist and Communist Russia was huge; the practical difference in the end was minimal.