74
PARTISAN REVIEW
makes up for by its vivid picture of its anti-hero as politician, leader
and ruler.
Those who, like the present reviewer, have known Stalin personally
will recognize in this work a true portrait, and those who have known him
only through the extravagancies of official Stalinist hagiography or bitter
and unthoughtful denunciation, will for the first time understand the man
in the setting of his country, his time and the movement that has shaped
and been
sh~ped
by him. And that, after all, is the main requirement of a
public man's biography.
The book is more than just a "life"; it is at the same time a picture
and analysis of the decay and degeneration of the Soviet State and the Rus–
sian Revolution. Here the details and evidence are piled up in such selec–
tive profusion that it automatically becomes the best source book so far
written for an understanding of what has happened and is happening in
the Soviet Union.
The author traces the degeneration of the Russian Revolution, as
nearly as I can summarize so rich a material in brief compass, along the
following lines:
1.
The program and organization of the Bolshevik party arose from
the fusion of an imported, readymade European Marxist doctrine with a
specifically Russian conception of the professional revolutionary, the dis–
ciplined army and the authoritative leader.
2'.
Lenin was brilliant enough, humane, self-critical and flexible
enough to make his leadership on the whole salutary, but when he was
wrong,
ill,
or in exile and cut off from communication, the party was apt
to be wrong and incapable of sound self-orientation. Little deficiencies
in
his leadership were adopted and enlarged by his successors who lacked his
restraining and offsetting positive qualifications.
3. Lenin never forgot that democracy was inseparable from socialism.
But under the stress of the hard conditions of civil war and a world of
enemies, under the conditions of a ruined and backward land and an
uncultured, unnumerous and exhausted proletariat, and faced with the
inability to
win
the support of or work with other parties, the Bolsheviks
drifted during the course of the revolution into a dictatorship of a single
party. Followed the destruction first of the soviets and soviet democracy,
then increasingly of party democracy. This led-to some extent even while
Lenin was alive and against his desire and sporadic resistance-to the
systematization, codification and permanence of measures originally
regarded as exceptional and intended only to meet a temporary emergency.
In time the "temporary state of emergency" became the permanent atmos·
phere of the Soviet dictatorship.
4. Lenin's program was more suited than that of any of his rivals for
the ending of Russia's ruinous participation in the war, for the seizure of
power, and for the solution of the hardly soluble problems of wartime
Russia. But the program was based upon a false calculation as to the
situation in Western Europe and the tempo of world revolution. Whether
