Published in Washington, D.C. October 8, 1996 Focus on Politics Vladimir Lenin as Genghis Khan By Richard Grenier THE WASHINGTON TIMES Now that Dr. Michael DeBakey has given Boris Yeltsin a 98 percent chance of surviving heart by-pass surgery, the image is receding of early Bolshevik leaders waiting with knives unsheathed as V.I. Lenin lay dying in 1923. But the line of succession of the "New Russia" is still shaky. Although he died at 54, over a decade younger than Boris Yeltsin today, Lenin had a whole series of strokes which bit by bit left him paralyzed, for the last two months completely so, unable to speak except for a few sounds like "vot-vot" (here-here). The Russian people, of course, knew nothing of this. And in the last months Lenin withdrew from everyone, even his most trusted lieutenants. With power shifting constantly among them, a group of "old Bolsheviks" -- Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Radek, Stalin -- were in effective control. (Later with Stalin in sole control, none of the others survived the purges of the 1930s.) Despite the word that's been put out for generations, Stalin was Lenin's favorite and the man he thought best qualified to succeed him. But at the end Lenin turned against Stalin, too. As Lenin's health failed, Stalin played for time. Eventually the paralysis was total -- and Stalin had won.Now every country, I suppose, would like to have as its founder a George Washington: kind, gentlemanly, inspired by high ideals. But Yale has just published "The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archives," edited by Harvard's Richard Pipes, author of a superb three-volume work on the Bolshevik Revolution. And now that the truth is out, Lenin, the Soviet Union's holy ancestor, is seen to match Stalin for cruelty point for point. In 1918 Lenin sent a secret letter to the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars: "It is necessary secretly -- and urgently -- to prepare the Terror." The Kremlin promptly issued decrees inaugurating the Red Terror, which would claim tens of thousands of victims (including the recipient of the original letter). One thing unmistakable in the newly released documents is Lenin's utter disregard for human life. For mankind at large he had nothing but the most extraordinary coldness. All reports of pillage and of anti-Semitic pogroms committed by the Red Army he marked "Into the Archive," which is to say no corrective action was to be taken. When the Cheka (KGB) (not known for its sensitivity to suffering) reported that 100,000 prisoners of war from the defeated White Army were being held under "inhuman conditions," it was again "Into the Archive." Lenin was prepared to "burn Baku to the ground," to "exterminate every Cossack to a man." Burning, exterminating, conspicuously hanging hundreds of "kulaks" here and hundreds there to inspire terror, Lenin sounds more like Genghis Khan than a man who'd come to liberate humankind from oppression.In dealing with non-Bolsheviks, Lenin's methods were different. He either intimidated them or bribed them, and the bribes were often large ("spend millions, many, many millions"). Interestingly, the one sentiment Lenin never appealed to was idealism. He apparently had no faith in it. Maxim Gorky said that Lenin's attitude toward mankind was that of the iron worker, swinging his sledge hammer, toward iron ore. Beaten mercilessly, mankind might in time be shaped into something worthwhile. But for the present Lenin had no feeling for it at all. Of leading Soviet officials, the one who served both Lenin and Stalin, Foreign Minister Molotov, said that of the two Lenin was decidedly the "harsher." Now the fact that citizens of the Soviet state as it established itself should want to have a George Washington as founder has some sense in it. But why foreigners, whose governments were at odds with the Soviet Union, should want to canonize Lenin is more complex and distinctly strange -- although in America this strangeness is confined to the intellectual classes. Tina Rosenberg, whose "The Haunted Land," a study of post-Communist Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany, has recently won both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, is an extreme case, elevating not only Lenin but Stalin to her pantheon. We must never, she warns us, make the grotesque error of judging Communist and Nazi brutalities by the same standard. Fascist ideas, she writes, are "repugnant," whereas, "Communism's ideas of equality, solidarity, social justice, an end to misery, and power to the oppressed are indeed beautiful. The New Socialist Man -- tireless, cheerful, clean, brave, thrifty, and kind to animals -- is an ideal all humanity should aspire to reach." So if you get slaughtered by a fascist it's disgusting and inhumane. But if you're slaughtered by a Communist, you're being butchered in a good cause because of all the beautiful ideals the Communist has in his head. And an idealistic thinker like Miss Rosenberg would find a person's being torn limb from limb by a Communist really hard to condemn. The question, after reading "The Unknown Lenin," is how people like Miss Rosenberg ever persuaded themselves that the early Bolsheviks -- and in her case even Stalin -- were such beautiful idealists, their ravages not to be judged by the same standard as those of other murderers. As for her puerile notion of the beautiful "New Socialist Man," tireless, cheerful, clean, brave, kind to animals -- all I can say is during countless trips to the Soviet Union, well before its collapse, he was nowhere in evidence. But Miss Rosenberg is apparently not alone in her Socialist daydreaming, as I see she's just been appointed to the editorial board of the New York Times. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Published October 8, 1996, in The Washington Times Copyright © 1996 News World Communications, Inc. ------------------------------------------------------------------------

 
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