Lenin's testament [Archive]

Ismail

14th August 2009, 12:50

As far as the whole "I don't trust Stalin, he's an asshole and has too much influence, remove him" went, it failed. The testament itself was pretty much intended to assert that all the leading members of the party had their mistakes, though. It was the postscript that was actually anti-Stalin. The testament is pretty much "Trotsky is a newcomer; he came to our party in 1917, Kamenev and Zinoviev betrayed our party in 1917, Bukharin sucks at dialectics and theory, and Stalin has too many duties and responsibilities assigned to him. All of you have had problems." As Ian Grey noted in his book Stalin: Man of History (which I highly recommend as a bio on him): "Stalin was now the only Bolshevik leader who was a member of the Central Committee, Politburo, Orgburo, and the Secretariat, the four closely interlinked organs which controlled every aspect of the party and of national life"

Two articles from a pro-Stalin view on the Testament:
http://web.archive.org/web/20020918055903/www22.brinkster.com/harikumar/CommunistLeague/TESTAMENT.HTM
http://www.plp.org/books/Stalin/node13.html#SECTION00400400000000000000

My view:

The testament was dictated amid increasingly fractured relations between Lenin and Stalin, mainly on the question of what to do with Georgia within the context of a USSR. Before that relations between Lenin and Stalin were generally on good terms (Lenin pretty much proposed that Stalin be made General Secretary in 1922) though Lenin was alarmed to the extent of which Stalin had rapidly gained followers within the party. As Molotov noted in his memoirs, Lenin didn't like it when one faction gained more influence, he felt that they were damaging to the party. (Lenin eventually banned party factions)

The postscript, in which Lenin accused Stalin of being rude, was dictated due to two things:

The first was because of how Stalin and his allies were handing the Georgian question. For example, Ordzhonikidze (his ally) got into an argument with one of the pro-autonomous Georgians and it got to a point where said Georgian accused Ordzhonikidze of corruption (over the ownership of a... white horse), so Ordzhonikidze punched him in the face. This was an incident among others that convinced Lenin to change his views from initially favoring Stalin, Ordzhonikidze and Dzerzhinsky, to going against them and supporting the autonomists. He believed that it got to the point where Stalin and co. were acting like "bullies" to the Georgian autonomists.

The second was due to Stalin calling Lenin's wife a "*****," which upset Lenin quite a bit (he relied on her for information) and was the primary factor in creating the postscript.

The postscript, unlike the testament, is emotional in tone and clearly wasn't written in an objective state of mind.

Tower of Bebel

14th August 2009, 14:29

I'm a bit in a hurry, but I hope you'll understand this:

What exactly did Lenin's last testament state about [..] the future leadership of the Communist Party?
To what extent was it followed?

The following makes up the kernell of the whole testament:

Our Party relies on two classes and therefore its instability would be possible and its downfall [or its liquidation as a revolutionary party] inevitable if there were no agreement between those two classes. In that event this or that measure, and generally all talk about the stability of our C.C., would be futile. No measure of any kind could prevent a split in such a case. But I hope that this is too remote a future and too improbable an event to talk about. I have in mind stability as a guarantee against a split in the immediate future [...].

The increase in the number of C.C. members to 50 or even 100 must, in my opinion serve a double or even a treble purpose: the more members there are in the C.C., the more men will be trained in C.C. work and the less danger there will be of a split due to some indiscretion. The enlistment of many workers to the C.C. will help the workers to improve our administrative machinery, which is pretty bad. We inherited it, in effect, for the old regime, for it was absolutely impossible to reorganise it in such a short time, especially in conditions of war, famine, etc. That is why those "critics" who point to the defects of our administrative machinery out of mockery or malice may be calmly answered that they do not in the least understand the conditions of the revolution today. It is altogether impossible in five years to reorganise the machinery adequately, especially in the conditions in which our revolution took place. It is enough that in five years we have created a new type of state in which the workers are leading the peasants against the bourgeoisie; and in a hostile international environment this in itself is a gigantic achievement. But knowledge of this must on no account blind us to the fact that, in effect we took over the old machinery of state from the tsar and the bourgeoisie and that now, with the onset of peace and the satisfaction of the minimum requirements against famine, all our work must be directed towards improving the administrative machinery.

[...]

The working-class members of the C.C. must be mainly workers of a lower stratum than those promoted in the last five years to work in Soviet bodies; they must be people closer to being rank-and-file workers and peasants, who, however, do not fall into the category of direct or indirect exploiters. I think that by attending all sittings of the C.C. and all sittings of the Political Bureau, and by reading all the documents of the C.C., such workers can form a staff of devoted supporters of the Soviet system, able, first, to give stability to the C.C. itself, and second, to work effectively on the renewal and improvement of the state apparatus.

So there were two problems. The first one is that the party needed the support from two classes. These two sometimes had opposing interests, of course. The second was the growing party and state bureaucracy. The Soviet Union was "a workers and peasants state with a bureaucratic twist to it":

(On trade unions and trotsky's mistake)

[...] Comrade Trotsky speaks of a "workers' state". May I say that this is an abstraction. It was natural for us to write about a workers' state in 1917; but it is now a patent error to say: "Since this is a workers' state without any bourgeoisie, against whom then is the working class to be protected, and for what purpose?" The whole point is that it is not quite a workers' state. That is where Comrade Trotsky makes one of his main mistakes. We have got down from general principles to practical discussion and decrees, and here we are being dragged back and prevented from tackling the business at hand. This will not do. For one thing, ours is not actually a workers' state but a workers' and peasants' state. And a lot depends on that. (Bukharin : "What kind of state? A workers' and peasants' state?") Comrade Bukharin back there may well shout "What kind of state? A workers' and peasants' state?" I shall not stop to answer him. Anyone who has a mind to should recall the recent Congress of Soviets,[3 (http://www.marx2mao.com/Lenin/TUTM20.html#en3)] and that will be answer enough.
But that is not all. Our Party Programme -- a document which the author of the ABC of Communism knows very well -- shows that ours is a workers' state with a bureacratic twist to it. We have had to mark it with this dismal, shall I say, tag. There you have the reality of the transition. [...] We now have a state under which it is the business of the massively organised proletariat to protect itself, while we, for our part, must use these workers' organisations to protect the workers from their state, and to get them to protect our state. Both forms of protection are achieved through the peculiar interweaving of our state measures and our agreeing or "coalescing" with our trade unions.

But from both problems Lenin faced another problem was derived: the possibility of splits. The most obvious one was one in the form of the Stalin-Trotsky "problem".

Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary-General, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution. Comrade Trotsky, on the other hand, as his struggle against the C.C. on the question of the People's Commissariat of Communications has already proved, is distinguished not only by outstanding ability. He is personally perhaps the most capable man in the present C.C., but he has displayed excessive self-assurance and shown excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of the work.

This circumstance may appear to be a negligible detail. But I think that from the standpoint of safeguards against a split and from the standpoint of what I wrote above about the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky it is not a [minor] detail, but it is a detail which can assume decisive importance.
So here you have Lenin ciritcizing two possbile kandidates to become the most powerful man in the Soviet Russia; two kandidates who are not only fighting each other but who are also possibly bureaucratic.

Was Lenin's adviced followed? I don't think so.