Lust for Destruction

Lenin is one of history’s greatest political mass murderers.

Book review by Waller R. Newell

Waller R. Newell is professor of political science and philosophy at Carleton University, and the author, most recently, of Tyrants: A History of Power, Injustice, and Terror (Cambridge University Press).

Journalist Victor Sebestyen’s Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror is a fast-paced, absorbing new biography of one of history’s greatest revolutionaries—or, if you share my perspective, political mass murderers. Scrupulously researched and vividly written, it is the first major new biography of Vladimir Lenin in 20 years and makes extensive use of the archival materials that have become available in that time. 

After he led the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 against the crumbling Czarist autocracy, Lenin’s socialist state quickly became a totalitarian hell of mass executions, forced collectivization, and slave labor.

Sebestyen’s biography explores of Lenin’s ideological writings before and after the Revolution, which have become available in recent years. Nevertheless, I don’t think they add anything fundamental to what we already knew. Lenin was no more a “theorist” than was the Führer, his dreary tracts mainly vicious diatribes against rivals.

Among his epithets for anyone who disagreed with him were “filthy scum,” “whores,” “class traitors,” and “scoundrels.” Ransacked bits of Karl Marx served his purpose of seizing absolute power and crushing society, just as Hitler would later invoke Friedrich Nietzsche.

In Lenin’s version of Marxism before the revolution, tactical compromise with other political groups was possible, but there could be no compromise on the strategic goal of a collectivized society without private property. Like Robespierre during the Jacobin Terror, Lenin aimed to impose a geometrical purity on corrupt human fodder.

This cold-blooded lust for destruction was born primarily of his outrage over his brother Aleksandr’s execution in 1887 for treason and the family’s resulting disgrace, for which he sought revenge on the whole world. Decades after it happened, Sebestyen writes, Lenin confided to Nadya that he was still “bitter…about Sasha’s execution and how much he hated the regime that sentenced him to death.”

Lenin never believed that socialism could triumph in Russia alone and would never have been content with such small stakes. (“I spit on Russia,” he once said. “This is merely one phase through which we must pass on the way to a world revolution.”) He thought the Russian Revolution would spur a proletarian uprising in Europe, which would then, with its far more advanced industrial means of production, help Russia’s backward agrarian society.

When World War I shook Czarist Russia to its foundations—millions of casualties in the trenches and a collapsing economy sparking unrest at home—Leon Trotsky egged Lenin on to seize control amidst the chaos. Despite his later pose in exile in the West as a sensitive intellectual, Trotsky was another revolutionary nihilist and mass murderer, an armed bohemian seeking revenge against his exclusion from prominence.

“Whatever moral eunuchs and Pharisees might say,” he enthused, “the feeling of revenge has its right…. We [must] direct all our strengths toward a collective struggle against this class structure. That is the method by which the burning desire for revenge can achieve its greatest moral satisfaction.”

Seizing power in a coup d’état, the Bolsheviks used the empty husk of the Czars’ now vacant absolute state to impose Communism by force. It was a one-party state from the start: the “first freely elected government” in 1917, Sebestyen observes, “survived for about twelve hours. There would not be another for nearly seventy-five years.”

From the outset, Bolshevik savagery surpassed the Czars at their most autocratic. During the final years of Czarism in Russia, 1,144 political prisoners were executed following the failed 1905 revolution.

Immediately following the 1917 coup, Lenin had upwards of 100,000 “enemies of the revolution” liquidated, and by the time of his incapacitation in 1922 from a stroke, an estimated 5 million had lost their lives due to starvation. As Lenin put it, “a revolution without firing squads is meaningless. The purpose of terror is to terrorize.” Although he claimed to be a Marxist, Lenin he was really a putschist and would-be dictator.

As Robert Conquest observed, the Communist Party leadership contained no genuine economists. They were pledged to a millenarian doctrine, and their justification for holding power was to create by force a new, superior society in which the individual was submerged in the collective.

As Sebestyen observes, “the first major ‘deviationist’” from Marxist theory was Lenin himself. He set about to create a socialist state by force, despite the absence of the socio-economic conditions Marx had decreed as necessary for its success according to the laws of “scientific socialism.”

Lenin and his henchmen were devoid of patriotism, since their revolution was but the first stage in a coming international Communist order. Any illusions people might have had that Lenin stood for electoral democracy were dashed when the 1921 Kronstadt rebellion against emerging Soviet dictatorship was ruthlessly put down.

The passion for a kind of justice born of righteous rage, with its call for the wholesale destruction and reconstruction of existence, is at the psychological core of revolutionary politics. Anger over the feeling that one has been treated unjustly is common to all people. But few act violently on that sense of righteous indignation, content instead to seethe inwardly, and fewer still carry that vengeance through to the attempted destruction of the world around them and its replacement with a new order that will enshrine their own supremacy.

In just about every case of a millenarian tyrant, we find a shattering experience in early life that drove these young men to bring everything down in flames in order to avenge themselves for these injustices and insults, a vengeance now extended from the original cruel or neglectful authority figure who treated them so slightingly  to entire social forces, classes, and races—“the bourgeoisie,” “the reactionaries,” “the aristos,” “the kulaks,” “the Jews.”

If Lenin’s brother had not been executed for being a subversive, if Hitler had succeeded in getting into art school, if Mao had not felt looked down on for his peasant origins, Russia, Germany, and China might well have been spared the million-fold suffering brought about by their rise to power.

The ideological visions of Bolshevism, Nazism, and Maoism are, to be sure, indispensable for understanding their success and appeal. But the Leader’s righteous anger and aggression are the crucible in which those totalitarian fantasies are forged and imposed on reality with indomitable will power. This is the Lenin we need to keep uppermost in our minds when reading Victor Sebestyen’s comprehensive biography.