Engineers of Revolution

THE Bolshevist custom,’ writes Dr. Hopper of Harvard, ‘of giving collective credit and denying triumph to individuals has baffled those who seek explanation for achievements in the brain power of the leaders. Marx, Lenin, and Stalin make up the trinity of Bolshevism.’

THAT an amazing brain power first released and then harnessed the forces of the Russian revolution comes, perhaps, as a shock to people accustomed to think of the Bolsheviks as mere fanatics. But material now coming to light, in English, shows the pitiless sequence which makes revolution a science of social engineering. Marx charted the salients of the capitalist, fortress, and gave the proletariat a class identity. His was the master brain. Lenin was the field generalissimo who directed the assault in Russia. His rôle was that of destroyer, with visions of rebuilding. Stalin destroys and builds according to plan, His objective in the Five-Year Plan is socialism in a single country. After that is achieved, the ultimate goal is the same as it was with Marx and Lenin: socialism in all countries — World Revolution.

The two biographies of Lenin here reviewed are interesting when read as opposing interpretations of t he same summary of facts Lenin’s revolutionary work from boyhood to the end in 1924. Lenin: Red Dictator, by George Vernadsky (Yale University, $3.00), is an academic study with an anti-Bolshevik slant, documented, indexed, and valuable as a factual reference book. The author includes as introduction a Condensed review of the conditions which made the revolution inevitable. Of chief interest are the illuminating contrasts throughout the book between the old and the new, such as the recurrent ‘deadly parallel’ between the denunciations of Tsarist practices by the revolutionists and their own conduct when in power themselves. The freedom of Lenin to hunt game and to study while in exile on the Upper Yenisei, and even to marry Krupskaya there in 1898, is only one of the striking contrasts to the activities of the present Soviet ‘politicals in the northern forests.

D. S. Mirsky’s Lenin (Atlantic Monthly and Little, Brown, $2.50), on the other hand, is more of a literary essay, a confession of faith by an ex-enemy (Prince Mirsky is a convert to Leninism), a testimonial which might very well have been penned in the Kremlin itself. In the preface the author explains the broad Russian patriotism which motivated his conversion, and indicates that a similar change of view has seized many young émigrés. The picture of Lenin is not so sharply defined as one might wish. But many of Lenin’s personal traits are set forth with obvious sympathy — his neatness, his abstinence, his dislike of useless talk, his lack of personal ambition and egotism, and even such characteristics as his inability to roll his r’s. And human touches are not absent, such as Lenin’s suffering when political ruptures broke up friendships of long standing.

As to Lenin’s significance, Vernadsky describes him as a fanatic and opportunist in one person, a formidable political leader whose chief historical task was the destruction of private property, and one of the most fearful tyrants history has known, if the number of lives destroyed by his government be taken as criterium of judgment. To Mirsky, Lenin is a ‘maker of the modern world,’whose message has five propositions (like the five points of the star?), all centring on the theme of abolishing exploitation of man by man. Both these biographies are synthetic; neither author had contact with Lenin, or access to confidential documents and correspondence from which the Book of Lenin must eventually be written.

Isaac Don Levine’sStalin (Cosmopolitan, $3.50) bursts into the sultry literary haze hovering over the revolution with the abrupt brilliance of summer thunder and lightning, clearing the air, penetrating the shadows of concealed motive and action, and exposing the chief actors to the glare of unexpected sunlight. The major mystery, Stalin, the big boss of Bolshevism, is revealed in sharp detail. Stalin of the background; Stalin the trained conspirator, saying little and thinking deep; Stalin the epitome of revolutionary craft, is traced in tempestuous career from the theological seminary, where he studied Marx instead of Holy Writ, through the long years of cunning battle to his pinnacle in 1931 as the most powerful individual in the world. This book, long hoped for by students of Soviet puzzles, revolutionizes the study of the revolution.

Mr. Levine’s sources, denied to previous writers, include the private correspondence between Bolshevist leaders, the suppressed minutes of meetings the Kremlin now wishes to forget, the records of the Okhrana (Tsarist secret police), and an enormous amount of information which could have been harvested only by intimate contact with the leaders themselves. Use of these unpublished sources gives, the book an arresting ring of authority.

Mr. Levine has produced a powerful narrative, somewhat poetic in style, and as thrilling as an old-time romance. He gives first the geographical setting, the Caucasian Cradle of Stalin, where the ‘wine is cool and the temper hot,’ where the poetry of races and mountains has shaped history, and thence sweeps the reader into all of Eurasia, the Cradle of Bolshevism, where East and West grapple in eternal contradiction. Against that background the tale of Stalin unfolds.

The human Stalin appears in many vivid touches — the Stalin without vices, who drinks wine with his meals, and smokes his pipe after supper while telling humorous stories. That Stalin’s health breaks down now and then is not generally known. Nor is it public knowledge that he was expelled from the party for the Tiflis robbery in 1907, and that his career is marked by many instances of insubordination, the very charge he hurls at old Bolsheviks when hounding them into exile. Stalin was mobilized for military service during the World War, but was rejected by the medical officers because his warped left hand could not hold a rille!

This book is a triumph in a field hitherto dark — Stalin’s method of building power. Stalin of the many names and many rôles, putting order and effectiveness into Lenin’s formulas, lacking culture but absorbing knowledge, holding the races in leash when Commissar of Nationalities, convincing the party while Trotsky was wooing the masses — it was this Stalin, political boss with an education, who finally changed the formula of dictatorship of to dictatorship for the proletariat.

Finally, after giving a valuable history of state planning, Levine pictures Stalin as the big business man of the revolution, introducing Americanism as a Five-Year Plan. ‘Conceived in distress, propelled by panic, fed on false promises, driven by emotional and rational means, the Five-Year Plan in the hands of the Stalin dictatorship is like a rocket proceeding to the moon.’ Where the Stalin adventure will end the author does not presume to know.

BRUCE HOPPER