Too little, too late

This collection of Lenin's last letters and articles is extremely interesting. Indeed, these may be the most interesting and candid texts ever written by Lenin, and also the least overtly ideological. The most sensational letters in this collection weren't published until 1956, when Khrushchev launched his "de-Stalinization". In his so-called Testament, Lenin explicitly wants Stalin to be removed from the post as Secretary General of the Communist Party. This document was too hot to handle, and was known only to the party leadership until Stalin's death made it possible to declassify it.

However, the other classified letters are really just as sensational. Thus, Lenin seems to be suggesting that the USSR should become a much looser union, with Moscow only dealing with matters of foreign diplomacy and military defence, while internal matters should be taken care of by the Soviet republics (the republics were the Soviet equivalent to US states). True, his suggestion isn't very worked out, and he wants to keep a single Communist Party across the entire USSR. Since the party had most of the effective power, it's difficult to see how this would *really* lead to a looser union. Yet, it's nevertheless interesting that Lenin makes such a proposal, and here as well, his criticism is at least indirectly levelled at Stalin. The letter was prompted by The Georgian Affair, a conflict between Stalin and the Georgian Communists, who wanted a certain amount of autonomy from Moscow. However, the implications were much broader. Lenin explicitly and rather passionately condemns Greater Russian chauvinism and believes that non-Russians should get more extensive rights (including language rights). He also connects this to the need for revolutions in China, India and the Middle East, revolutions Lenin believed would be more or less nationalist. Therefore, a policy of concessions to the non-Russians even in the USSR was necessary.

Another remarkable article, published already at the time, deals with co-operatives. It was written in 1923. Lenin proposes the gradual organization of the entire Russian peasantry on co-operative lines, and says that this is "all that is needed" to build socialism! The idea of a network of co-operative farms and shops in the countryside is clearly connected to the New Economic Policy (NEP). Lenin believes that the NEP must be extended to ten or twenty years. What makes the article interesting is that Lenin doesn't seem to be treating NEP as a retreat, but rather sees its extension into co-operative forms as a novel way of building socialism, i.e. an offensive strategy.

Strictly speaking, none of these policies were implemented after Lenin's death. Bukharin was the foremost proponent of the NEP, but the new economy was dominated by kulaks and middlemen, rather than by co-operatives. Bukharin did extend language rights for non-Russians (sometimes with humorous results - for instance, the Russian-dominated labour unions in the Ukraine were expected to deliberate in Ukrainian), but overall, the Soviet Union stayed just as centralized as before. And, of course, Stalin was never removed from his position as Secretary General, with well known results.

In other articles, Lenin admits that most of the Soviet state apparatus isn't particularly Communist or proletarian! Rather, the Communist regime has simply taken over the old Czarist bureaucracy. It's an apparatus dominated by "bourgeois" and "petty bourgeois" elements. But what should be done about it, then? At one point, Lenin proposes that the Central Committee and the Control Commission should select more working class members, real manual workers who haven't turned bureaucratic. Lenin also wants the state bureaucracy to become more efficient, more along West European or North American lines. If these measures would really have solved the problems is, of course, another matter entirely...

The proposals in "The last letters and articles" turned out to be too little, too late.