The myth that the masses supported the Bolshevik seizure of power.

         History a la the Kremlin has convinced a large part of the world that the common people in Russia, especially the workers, rallied to the defense of .the Bolshevik dictatorship. The opposition, it avers, came from monarchists, capitalists, 'landlords, aristocrats, and other assorted "reactionaries." To make this credible, Soviet historians have had to gloss over, with a few outrageous lies, the national elections held within eighteen days after the coup d'etat.

         The hopes of self-government unleashed by the fall of tsarism were centered on the Constituent Assembly, a democratic parliament to draw up a democratic' constitution. Lenin and his followers, of course, jumped on that bandwagon, too, posing not merely as advocates of the parliament but as its only true friends. What if the voting went against them? They piously pledged themselves to abide by the popular mandate.

         "As a democratic government," Pravda asserted on the morrow of the seizure of power, "we cannot disregard the decision of the people, even if we do not agree with it. If the peasants follow the Social Revolutionaries farther, even if they give that party a majority in the Constituent Assembly, We shall say: so be it."

         In his first weeks Lenin did not yet feel himself strong enough to renege on the most conspicuous of his pledges. The balloting began on November 25, and continued until December 9. Despite the prevailing disorders and confusion, thirty-six million cast their secret ballots in parts of the country normal enough to hold elections. (45) In most of the large, centers of population, the voting was conducted under Bolshevik auspices. .

         Yet twenty-seven of the thirty-six million votes went to other parties. The peasant-oriented Social Revolutionaries received 58 per cent; Lenin's lists drew nine million, only about 25 per cent, less than half as many as the only other well-organized party. As David Shub put it in his biography of. Lenin, "The Russian people, in the freest election in modem history, voted for moderate socialism and against the bourgeoisie." They voted against the Bolsheviks.

         Lenin had no doubt that if the elected parliament survived, his imposed regime would not. He had not expected to win a majority and never had any intention of allowing such a democratic institution to sink roots. Already unsure of the allegiance of locally based troops, he had imported a division of Lettish sharpshooters as military - insurance.

         The assembly was scheduled to meet in the old Duma Building, the Tauride Palace, in Petrograd on the afternoon of January 18, 1918. That morning massive columns of unarmed workers and peasants marched toward the center of the city with banners hailing the parliament and proclaiming their faith in democracy. Thousands more joined up, in a jubilant spirit, as the parade proceeded. But when the procession approached Tauride Palace, its path was blocked by the sharpshooters, who opened fire without warning. About a. hundred of the peaceful demonstrators were killed, hundreds were wounded, the rest fled in panic.

         Despite this sanguinary prelude, the deputies from all over Russia gathered for their first--and last--meeting. Victor Chernov, of the majority Social Revolutionary Party, was elected chairman. Except for the communist members, and perhaps even for many of them, it was a solemn historical moment. The Constituent Assembly was the embodiment of a vision that had been Russia's for a century. But they found the galleries and the aisles filled by noisy, drunken, jeering crowds-admission tickets had been issued solely by Lenin's soldiers.

         The "guests" shouted down the delegates, intruded on the platform, and subsided only when Bolsheviks rose to speak. (46) Others had to struggle against a raucous, whistling, foul-mouthed mob. Lenin lolled on the stairs leading to the platform, sneering and jeering and egging on his unruly bullyboys. Fighting the turbulence at every step, the democratic majority managed to debate and adopt a number of cardinal resolutions. The most important provided far-reaching agrarian reforms, under which the land would be distributed to those who worked it.

         When the session adjourned toward dawn, everyone knew it would never reopen. The first and last genuine expression of the people's will after the revolution was suppressed in cynicism and violence. The more optimistic deputies, returning to the Tauride Palace the next day, found its doors locked and sealed. The fate of the Revolution, too, was sealed. No one who respects fact could ever again claim that the regime had been approved by the masses. In an eloquent indictment of the "handful of madmen" who had murdered the elected assembly, Gorki wrote a fitting epithet:

         "Yesterday the streets of Petrograd and Moscow resounded with shouts of 'Long live the Constituent Assembly!' For giving vent to these sentiments, the peace-paraders were shot down by the 'People's Government.' On January 19, the Constituent Assembly expired-until the advent of happier days-its death foreboding new sufferings for the martyred and for the masses of the people."

         The maddest of the madmen was merely amused by such rhetoric. He valued a Lettish rifleman- above all the intellectual humanitarians put together. To associates who complained in the name of Russia, Lenin said: "I spit on Russia. . . . This is merely one phase through which we must pass on the way to a world revolution." Russia, in other words, was expendable, a battered beachhead in a war for world dominion.

Red Army and Red Terror

         The titanic resistance touched off by the capture of power on November 7 was raised to a pitch of frenzy by the crushing of the Constituent Assembly. (47) But history is written by the victors. In this case their "dialectical" trick was to present the sprawling and intricate struggle of 1919-1921 as merely a two-way contest between so-called Reds and Whites, the "revolution" and the "counterrevolution." Actually it was a bizarre complex of conflicts covering the whole- political spectrum, from monarchists and national separatists to anarchists, fighting each other in shifting patterns of alliance and betrayal, with mass desertions and re-desertions. There were endless gradations of Whites, Reds; Greens, and even a Yellow-and-Blue contender. The babble of slogans for which tens of thousands died included "All power to the Constituent Assembly!" and "Soviets without communists!" Competing armies fought for the national independence of the Ukraine, with its forty million inhabitants; of Georgia in the Caucasus; of the Moslem nationalities in Central Asia.

         Virtually all the clashing guerrilla formations and organized armies were anti-Communist. But they were so divided by mutual hatreds that the Bolshevik forces whipped into a Red Army by the genius of Leon Trotsky could triumph in the end. At the lowest point in its fortunes the Soviet regime controlled only a small area around Moscow and, Petrograd; many of, the leaders were then packing for what they considered imminent defeat and flight abroad. Under war cries directed against the Right, the Leninists, in fact, concentrated on demolishing the Left. With good reason, they feared opposition socialist revolutionaries, and liberals more than all the monarchists put together. While the country was overwhelmingly hostile to the Bolsheviks, it was no less frightened of a return of landlords, aristocrats, and monarchists. For Lenin and his associates the primary dangers were the revolutionaries and democrats. Their prisons were soon crammed with men and women famous in Russian revolutionary annals. Tsarist generals willing to work for Trotsky had more chance of saving their skins than non-Bolshevik veterans of the long fight against the old order.

         The civil war-one of the longest and bloodiest in modern times-was not only military. (48) It was no less bloody on the civilian side. In peasant revolts, strikes, looting; sabotage, from one end of the empire to the other. The Red Army was the answer to the military challenge. To deal with the civilian challenge there was the Red Terror. The two, of course, were intricately interwoven.

         The long reign of Bolshevism began with a decree on November 8, abolishing capital punishment-and an orgy of executions. When Lenin, who was absent, heard of the decree he was furious. How dared they give in to what he had once called the "intelligentsia-bred prejudice" against taking life. Trotsky was to write later, "Lenin at every opportunity kept hammering into our heads that terror was unavoidable. Trotsky's own leonine head needed no hammering: he had plenty of the homicidal zest that seem to go with self -righteousness. "As for us," Trotsky declared in 1920, "we were never concerned with the Kantian priestly...and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the 'sacredness of life-thus justifying in advance his own eventual murder by Stalin's killers.

         In remarkably short order, Lenin and the rest won a place in the select company of history's mass murderers that counts Caligula, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Fouquier-Tinvill, and Hitler. The hostage system-the killing "of innocents at random to avenge real or imagined attacks on the new rulers-was carried -to extreme lengths. "One person out of ten will be shot, whether guilty or "not," an early warning said. The ratio was rapidly stepped up.

         Under the fanatic Pole, Felix Djerzhinski, the newly formed security organization, the - Cheka (from the - first letters of each word of the full Russian name: che and ka) began to carve its initials on the naked and writhing body of Russia. His "revolutionary sword" was wielded like a butcher knife.

         If the Pole was the technician of Red Terror, Lenin was its theoretician. The myth has it that the Red Terror was merely the answer to its White counterpart. In fact had been promised and justified many years in advance. "There must be submission to the armed vanguard," Lenin wrote. "During the period when the proletariat still needs the state, it does not require it in the interests of freedom but in the interests of crushing its antagonists." (49) His terror was wreaked not only on the Whites, but also, and especially, on Reds of other persuasions. Lenin looked down on the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution as a piffling affair. "The guillotine," he said, "only terrorized active resistance. . . . We have to break down passive resistance, which doubtless is the most harmful and dangerous of all." Where the French Terror was directed against real oppositionists, the Soviet Terror sought to destroy also those who might, because of their social origins or character, oppose the new masters in the future.

         Besides prison and death, Lenin proposed calculated use of hunger and forced labor to erase actual and potential non-conformists. (Later Stalin thus showed himself to be a good Leninist.) "We shall be ruthless toward our enemies," Lenin announced, "as well as toward all hesitant and noxious elements in our midst." "All hesitant and noxious elements"--on the face of it, this was a formula that took in the whole population.

         When protests against the blood madness were voiced abroad, Lenin released "an open letter to American workers." "The British bourgeoisie," he argued, "have forgotten their year 1649, the French their 1795 . . . . Now the terror is criminal and cruel when the workers and poor peasants use it against the bourgeoisie."

         This was Lenin at his most cynical. He knew well enough that those who shrank in revulsion from his cruelties were no less horrified by the cruelties of other dictators in other times. More important, he knew that his terror was being applied not by but against the workers and peasants.

         Beyond Moscow and Petrograd, little Lenins aped the leader. In Bryansk the death penalty was decreed for drunkenness; in Vyatka for "leaving the house after 8 P.M."; in many areas for theft, anti-regime leaflets, and a hundred other new-minted capital crimes. In the course of a talk to a neighborhood Soviet, Zinoviev called for the extermination of ten million: "We must win over to our side ninety of the one hundred million inhabitants of Russia under the Soviets. (50) As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them; they must be annihilated." History proved his estimates far too modest—and he would himself be among the annihilated.

         The orgy of bloodletting must be understood as a measure of the resistance met by the usurpers. Terror was no less horrifying in scale and brutality on the part of the regime's adversaries. Unspeakable atrocities were committed on all sides, and each inflamed passions and bred retaliatory savagery. Anti-Jewish pogroms unleashed by the most reactionary armies, especially in the Ukraine, added to the sum-total of death and anguish. But between the Red and White extremes there were anti-Soviet movements which ruled out cruelty for cruelty's sake and renounced national or race hatreds. In terms of unlimited terror, Lenin and his associates must be equated with the worst, not the best, of their enemies. And only the communists added insult to injury by decking their barbarism with the raiment of a world-saving mission.

         In the nature of things, the workers and peasants, being the most numerous, provided the most victims. Peasant opposition was nearly so unanimous that the government hardly bothered to conceal it. "The kulak cherishes a fierce hatred of the Soviet government," Lenin conceded in August, 1918. Kulak, Russian for "fist," was a term of contempt applied to rich peasants, particularly those engaged in usurious money-lending, but the Bolsheviks made of it a propaganda term for any peasant resisting their new order, and that was nearly all of them. "That we brought the civil war to the village," Lenin wrote in the course of a polemic with Karl Kautsky, a European socialist, "is something we hold as a merit." At least that phase of the civil strife, he thus acknowledged, was deliberately provoked—brought to the village—in line with class-struggle doctrine. But the village was 85 per cent of Russia.

         Months before the White forces of tsarist restoration had become a great threat, the Bolsheviks faced a rising hostility among the very soldiers and sailors who had helped them into power. (51) The Petrograd regiments became so restive that the government had them disarmed. The evolutionary sailors—"the beauty and the pride of the revolution," in Trotsky's words—began to pass resolutions, demanding their abdication. The party shrewdly started to build up a Praetorian Guard of non-Russian mercenaries: Letts, Chinese, German and Austrian prisoners-of-war. ' In April, 1918, a conference of factory workers, claiming to speak for a hundred thousand Petrograd proletarians, formally demanded the resignation of the Soviet government. The only democratic faction to back Lenin's coup, the left wing of the Social Revolutionaries renounced the phony partnership and thereafter led all the rest in resistance to the dictatorship.

         The blood bacchanalia shed the last margins of restraint after August 30, 1918, when a Social Revolutionary, Dora (also known as Fanya) Kaplan, shot and wounded Lenin— as "a traitor to the revolution," she let it be known. The same day a Petrograd student assassinated Uritsky, the head of the regional Cheka.

         In the Bolshevik stronghold of Kronstadt, five hundred prisoners were thereupon dragged from their dungeons and mowed down by rifle fire. In Petrograd, 512 innocent hostages were shot in a few days. A Moscow telegram to all local Soviets said: "Done with weakness! Done with sentimental considerations!" A redoubtable Cheka chief, Comrade Latsis, announced: "We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. Don't look for incriminating evidence." If a man's or a woman's hands were not work-worn, he said, that was evidence enough. A paranoia of power and sadistic lust turned the Cheka into scavengers of a stricken nation.

         Whatever it may have been in theory, in practice Lenin's regime "evolved into a system of self-defense of a small minority against its own people—a system which has never been surpassed by any tyranny in the world's history." This was the verdict, in 1922, of Paul Miliukov, one of Russia's self-exiled democratic leaders. (52)

• The Kronstadt Rebellion

         The hundreds of large and small uprisings throughout the country are too numerous to list, let alone describe here. The most dramatic of them, in Kronstadt, epitomizes most of them. What gave it a dimension of supreme drama was the fact that the sailors of Kronstadt, an island naval fortress near Petrograd, on the Gulf of Finland, had been one of the main supports of the putsch. Now Kronstadt became the symbol of the bankruptcy of the Revolution. In the sycophantic writings about the glorious "new Russia," Kronstadt, if mentioned at all, is covered up with a few official lies.

         The sailors on the battleships and in the naval garrisons were in the final analysis peasants and workers in uniform. Soon enough they shared the disillusionment of the country at large. It was in the local Soviet and in the Kronstadt Communist Party that the spirit of insurgence first found expression, then spread to the naval and civilian population. Kremlin history, then and since, has attempted to dismiss the rebellion as the work of monarchists and emigre capitalists. But it was in the first place an insurrection within the Bolshevik elite itself. Many of the victims would die shouting, "Long live the Communist International!" and "Long live the Constituent Assembly!"

         The tragedy began with a mass meeting of fifteen hundred sailors and workers on March 1, 1921. Though Lenin had sent several of his best people—among them Mikhail Kalinin, well liked because of his peasant origin and personality—to take part in the proceedings, they could not stave off a resolution condemning the regime. "The present Soviets do not express the will of the workers and peasants," it charged, and went on to ask for "new elections by secret ballot, the pre-election campaign to have full freedom of agitation." The sailors demanded freedom of speech, press, and assembly, liberation of political prisoners, restoration of the peasants' right to the products of their labor—in short, fulfillment of the Bolshevik promises. (53)

         Four days later the Kronstadt sailors formed a small committee composed chiefly of communists, which assumed control of the town, the fortress, the ships. A brutally worded ultimatum by Trotsky as War Commissar, approved by Lenin, called for "unconditional surrender" or the "mutineers" would be shot "like partridges." When the committee refused to yield, Trotsky assigned Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the same General Tukhachevsky who was destined to be killed by Stalin, to take Kronstadt by force. Hundreds of Petrograd workers crossed the ice—the gulf is still frozen at that time of the year—to join the menaced Kronstadters.

         Tukhachevsky marched on the naval town with sixty thousand picked troops. Tough Cheka forces were deployed in the rear, ready to shoot army men who might flinch from attacking the heroes of the Revolution. One regiment, in fact, did mutiny, and was whipped back into line. The siege began with an aerial bombardment at 6:45 P.M. on March 6, followed by an artillery barrage. The sailors answered with fire from the fort and from their ships. Then the Red Army advanced across the ice. At several points the ice gave way and hundreds were drowned. In the final days the town was conquered street by street.

         Tukhachevsky later declared that in all his years of war and civil war, he had not witnessed carnage such as he overseen at Kronstadt. "It was not a battle," he said, "it was an inferno . . . . The sailors fought like wild beasts. I cannot understand where they found the might for such rage. Each house had to be taken by storm."

         On March 17, Tukhachevsky could report to the War Commissar that the job was finished. Kronstadt was a place of death. Eighteen thousand of the rebels, it was estimated, had been killed; thousands of government troops died. Hundreds were arrested and shot in the ensuing "pacification."

         The massacre of the sailors signalized the rupture of the last natural bond between the regime and the sons of the people. What remained was a thing alien and hated and cancerous. The totalitarian state had triumphed. Russia was a nation occupied by an internal enemy. (54)

• Bloody Road to NEP

         The purely military aspects of the civil war are better known in the outside world. Scholarly and voluminous studies of the subject have been published in many Western countries. Besides armies representing more or less specific political movements, there were freebooting forces under ambitious individual generals and civilian leaders. Meanwhile, until the dictated Brest-Litovsk peace in early 1918, the Germans were overrunning the Ukraine and cutting deep into the flesh of Crimea.

         The most formidable and the most nearly successful of the anti-Soviet military offensives was a great peasant uprising: the Antonov Rebellion, named for its leader, a military Social Revolutionary, (also known as the Tambov Uprising, from the region where it originated). Antonov rallied the embittered peasantry, whose crops were being forcibly requisitioned. Tambov fell to him, then Riazan, Tula, Kaluga; at the peak of the drive his partisans held an area as large as France, and his armies were approaching the Moscow province. The Soviet resistance in this operation, too, was commanded by Tukhachevsky.

         Superimposed on these conflicts were the several small-scale Allied interventions in the Murmansk-Archangel area on the North Sea, the Caucasus, the Siberian Far East. Then there were some forty thousand Czech prisoners of war, their ranks swelled by workers and peasants, fighting in the Urals. A coup d'etat made in the name of peace had brought another, equally terrible and more chaotic war.

         What all of the native fighting forces except the Red Army had in common was their detestation of the communist regime—although the socialist parties did, at times, side with the Bolsheviks against the other extremes. Had any substantial portion of these disparate elements been able to pool their strength under a combined command, the Soviet government would not have survived its first year. But Trotsky's armies were able to deal with them piecemeal. With both the old and the new capitals, Petrograd and Moscow, in their hands—firmly held by all-out terror—Trotsky and Lenin could throw their military strength against any point where the challenge was most urgent. (55)

         Hunger, soon to degenerate into famine, was everywhere, along with typhus, brigandage, the scourge of homeless children, bezprizornyie, hundreds of thousands of them roaming through the land like little wild animals. Against this background, the area of Soviet control was shrinking. In the fall of 1919, General Yudenich was advancing on Petrograd and actually penetrated its suburbs. The National Army of General Denikin had occupied most of the Ukraine. Admiral Kolchak, who styled himself Supreme Head of the anti-Soviet forces, was in control of much of Siberia. In Moscow, there was a deepening mood of panic and open talk of the inevitable defeat.

         Then the tide turned. One after another the Red Army dislodged the attackers. A Polish invasion, which had cut into the Ukraine as far as Kiev, was halted and converted into a rout and a counter-invasion of Poland by the Red Army, in its turn stopped near Warsaw and sent reeling back into Russia.

         As for Allied intercession, the key fact is that it was on a ludicrously small scale, lackadaisical, and wholly uncoordinated. The Allies were there primarily not to suppress the Bolsheviks, but to safeguard military supplies and weapons that might fall to the Germans, and certainly did not have their heart in the undertaking. In the aggregate fighting, the foreign share was negligible and in the overall resistance to Bolshevism it was nil. Since then Soviet mythology has magnified that episode out of all proportion to reality for propaganda purposes.

Lenin and Trotsky had achieved substantial success, by the early months of 1921. It remained only to mop up the separatist movements and regimes in the Ukraine, Georgia, and other non-Russian regions; the Moslem area of Central Asia would not be conquered for several years after the main conflict had been completed. The offensive against the separatists, too, was carried out with a maximum of brutality and casualties. Stalin, in charge of destroying the moderate socialist government in his native Georgia, was so wantonly murderous that even Lenin was alarmed. (56)

         If anything is clear in this initial period, it is that the Bolshevik dictatorship did not have the consent of the Russian peoples. It was forced upon the country by unrestricted violence and deceit. The tortured years stand as confutation of the continuing belief in some quarters that the masses submitted readily to the Bolshevik whip. The failure of their convulsive resistance should not blind us to its vast dimensions and sacrificial passion.

         Meanwhile, in 1921, one of the most devastating famines in Russian history was rapidly spreading. The Soviet masters, of course, cannot be blamed for the great drought that was its basic cause. But the war "brought to the villages," Lenin's oft-repeated statement that he would never surrender to the "rural counterrevolution," had left the countryside denuded of all food reserves and seeds. Between the systematic confiscation of farm products by the regime and seizures by the many armies, the peasantry was utterly helpless against the ravages of drought and famine. American charity, administered by Herbert Hoover from 1921 to 1923, through the ARA (American Relief Administration), saved millions of lives—as acknowledged by the Kremlin. More millions perished.

         In the wake of Kronstadt, with the famine deepening and communist hopes in Europe in collapse, Lenin was ready to make concessions to salvage his regime. His war communism—expressed mainly in requisitioning grain and other foodstuffs from hostile peasants—had been a ghastly failure. A New Economic Policy, better known by its initials as NEP, was announced within days after the sailors' uprising had been drowned in blood!

         It should be underlined that his retreat was solely economic. The dictatorship did not relax its totalitarian grip on the political machinery. The Cheka, under the revised name of GPU, continued and expanded as a government within the government. Not one of the basic political freedoms was restored. The Red Army was enlarged through conscription and consolidated.

         As the price for holding on to a political monopoly, the government gave up part of its economic monopoly. (57) This is pertinent to an understanding of the present-day situation —of the concessions made by the regime since the passing of Stalin. Again, the "improvements" and "reforms" do not affect the monopoly of political power.

         For Lenin and his associates, NEP was a bitter pill, forced down their throats by popular opposition to their instant communism. It was granted under the duress of universal resistance. Its authors looked upon the New Economic Policy as a holding operation, with full-scale socialization to be tried again when conditions for it would have matured. Meanwhile, they did not pretend that it was anything but a defeat.

         The NEP restored private enterprise first of all in agriculture (although legally the state still held title to all the land), then in small business both at the production and distribution ends. The government kept nationalized control of what is called the "commanding heights": big industry, communications, banking, foreign trade. With the end of the famine, this mixed economy began to nourish. Well-stocked shops blossomed on every city street. Goods that had seemed non-existent suddenly were in supply again. Small businesses and single craftsmen by the thousands competed for the trade of a population long starved for the simplest necessities. Agriculture quickly recovered momentum, its production growth beyond anything known in Russian history. By 1928, general living standards were back to 1913-1914 levels.

         Despite its limited character, NEP was a victory for the people, wrenched from the dictators by main force, paid for in mountains of corpses. Politically the people were defeated, but they never surrendered. Violent opposition eased off, though it never stopped entirely; passive forms of opposition increased and have continued into our own time.

• The Succession

         Lenin did not live long enough to see the unfolding of his resuscitated capitalism. In May, 1922, he suffered a paralytic stroke which in its later stages also wiped out his speech. (58) Bed-ridden for twenty months, he was tortured by forebodings of future power conflicts, between the most prominent and the least prominent members of the governing Politburo, Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin.

         In a memorandum, dictated to his wife and later celebrated as his Last Testament, Lenin urged that Stalin (Boris Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili) be removed from his post as Secretary General of the party and replaced by someone less rude, more patient and considerate. The swarthy, mustachioed Georgian, however, had used that position too shrewdly and ruthlessly to be dislodged. He had maneuvered his personal henchmen into party and government positions all over the country, so that by the time Lenin died, on January 21, 1924, Stalin was already the number-one bureaucrat.

         Lenin and the country had assumed that the incandescent Jewish intellectual, Trotsky (born Bronstein, son of a middle-class farmer in the Kherson region of the Ukraine) would inherit the toga of supreme leadership. Trotsky was the Revolution's most brilliant orator and an able writer. He had been the organizer of the Red Army and its victorious strategist, his name inseparable from Lenin's.

         But Stalin's genius for intrigue outweighed his adversary's brilliance and popularity. By playing off one group against the other, he succeeded in isolating Trotsky, then stripped him piecemeal of party positions. On the day after the tenth anniversary of Soviet power, Trotsky was exiled to Alma-Ata in Central Asia. Before 1927 had run its course, the colorless Georgian was sole master of Russia. About a year later, Stalin drove Trotsky out of the USSR. The former warlord resided in several countries of exile, the last of them Mexico. There, in 1940, after several unsuccessful previous attempts, Stalin finally caught up with him—one of his busy assassins split the exile's skull with an alpenstock.

         A serious weakness of all arbitrary dictatorships, the fact that they provide no machinery for a legal succession, was thus in evidence from the start. (59) This lack of institutional legitimacy guarantees permanent and relentless struggles for power at the upper levels, and by reflection down the pyramid at lower levels. Designation of an" heir by the incumbent dictator offers no remedy—his authority is interred with his bones. Neither Lenin nor Stalin was explicit about an heir to his mantle. Lenin, as we have noted, did rule out Stalin, who in due time assumed full power notwithstanding. It came, however, after a fierce and debilitating struggle against other contenders that kept the party and the country in a state of turbulence for nearly four years.

         Since the plan of this book is not chronological, the brief tale of succession can be told here in full. There have been only three true transfers of power in fifty years—from Lenin to Stalin, to Khrushchev, to the present bosses.

         Khrushchev, as a half-literate young workman, fought with the Red Army in the-civil war, then joined the party. With a keen instinct for power, he attached himself at once to the bureaucratic party apparatus and rose rapidly through the patronage of Lazar Kaganovich, whom he would ultimately demean and exile as an "anti-party" element. The charge often made abroad that Khrushchev was responsible for mass killings during the collectivization rive is unfounded. At that time he was merely a minor local official. But he would make up for it amply later as generalissimo of the no less massive purge slaughters in his native Ukraine.

         While a student in a party technical school, Khrushchev caught Stalin's attention by his fervor in informing on fellow students. Thereafter his rise was meteoric. Within three years he was party boss of the Moscow region. In this strategic post for five years, he distinguished himself in the carnage of the period, personally signing the death warrants of scores of his intimate friends. In August, 1937, at Stalin's behest, he swooped down on the Ukraine. Before he was through, tens of thousands were liquidated; only two of the 102 members of the "republic's" Central Committee escaped arrest or death. (60)

         Back in Moscow, he collected his reward—full membership in the Politburo. By the time Stalin died—or was murdered by his closest comrades-in-arms—Khrushchev rated number five in the hierarchy. Georgj Malenkov, who took over the nominal leadership, held it only nine days, after which he was succeeded as First Secretary, on an interim basis, by Khrushchev. The war for Stalin's power was on in deadly earnest. The number one menace was Lavrenty Beria, Stalin's long-time chief executioner and in command of the special security armies. In July, only four months after Stalin's funeral, Beria was lured to a meeting in the Kremlin and finished off with a bullet—by Khrushchev personally, if his boasts while in his cups are to be believed. The execution of thirty-nine alleged Beria confederates, and many others without the formality of a public announcement, made Khrushchev's ascendance secure. His status as First Secretary was made permanent. The title was not enough—in the next years he consolidated his power by ridding himself, seriatim, of all other visible contenders.

         How and why he was in his turn eliminated, in the fall of 1964, is still a mystery. Surmises are many. His ill-fated Virgin Lands program and the general decline of agriculture are often cited. The growth of his power, to the point where he was turning into another Stalin, surely alarmed his associates. Most important, perhaps, his economic reorganizations were enlarging the authority of local party stalwarts at the expense of the economic elite. It is a tribute to the high art of intrigue in the Kremlin that Khrushchev apparently had no inkling of the plot to turn him into an un-person until the day it actually happened. That very morning he was still talking to astronauts in orbit, but his successors, not he, were there to greet them when they came down to earth.

         For the first time, the transfer of power was without bloodletting. This is progress of a kind, but the current incumbents are hardly first-rate life-insurance risks. The top plotters, and joint successors, were Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin, his closest and most trusted collaborators. (61) Both of them are of the so-called post-Revolutionary generations, Kosygin having been eleven when the monarchy collapsed, Brezhnev thirteen.

         Because he studied land reclamation and then, at the age of thirty-three, graduated as a metallurgical engineer, Brezhnev is reputed to be a technocrat and economic specialist. But his true career, begun as a protege of Khrushchev in the Stalin era, has been in the party apparatus. He held a variety of posts on the regional level, was made an alternate member of the Politburo by Stalin, and became a full member after having backed Khrushchev in disposing of the so-called "anti-party" group of Molotov, Kaganovich, and Malenkov. Though he was designated "President" of the USSR, a largely honorific title, succeeding the aged Klementi Voroshilov, his real influence was exercised as Khrushchev's apparently most loyal associate.

         Kosygin fought in the civil war as a teen-ager but did not join the party until 1924, on the eve of Stalin's assumption of total power. As late as 1936, he was still only a foreman in a Leningrad textile plant. But three years later he was mayor of that city and head of the whole textile industry. The one virtue of the bloody purges, from the vantagepoint of ambitious men who managed to stay alive, was that they cleared the path to dramatic promotions.

         During the war Kosygin was made Deputy Premier, and in 1948 Stalin put him on the all-powerful Politburo. After the boss's death, he threw in his lot with Khrushchev. In 1959 he became head of Gosplan, the national planning agency, and at various times he served as Minister of Finance and Minister of Light Industry. Though so long at the center of power, Kosygin did not register on the public mind until the later Khrushchev years. Today, as Premier, he holds the top job in the government, which is a notch below the General Secretaryship of the party held by Brezhnev, who, at this writing, is gradually emerging as the real dictator.

         Both leaders are colorless, unsmiling administrators, typical of the new breed of faceless men produced by an aging, sclerotic revolution. They are technicians of power, with drab biographies, little known to their countrymen. (62)

         The mass of Soviet people, in fact, is remarkably disinterested in the game of succession played at the top. The elimination of Brezhnev and Kosygin, probably inevitable, will leave them as apathetic as did the exit of Khrushchev, or for that matter, the passing of one tsar and the enthronement of another "Little Father" in the past.