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Lenin, had he lived and retained his authority over the party, would have
been able to rectify its course to meet the problems of a Russian revolu–
tion that failed to spread into a world revolution, and whether he would
have been able to combat and correct the regime of "permanent emergency"
-Souvarine seems unable to quite make up his mind.
5. That none of the other leaders was capable of doing so or even
sufficiently conscious of the problems involved, Souvarine has no doubt.
Stalin defeated his various rivals for the succession because they were less
thoroughly than he an expression of Russia's backwardness and of the
newly developing bureaucratic interests, because they were less capable
than he in the obscure maneuvers required in a struggle which Souvarine
regards as not ideological in its essence but personal. Trotsky, his most
dangerous, popular and capable rival, was defeated because he did not
know how to organize a faction, did not know when to strike and when to
withhold, and because he himself justified and tended to enlarge the evil
aspects of Leninism which Stalin was developing from little flaws into an
entire system-the dictatorship of the party over the masses and the leaders
over the party, the theory of blind party loyalty and military discipline,
the tendency to discredit and annihilate proponents rather than to consider
and refute propositions, the use of military measures in the organization
of Russian economy and industrialization, and the cult of infallibility.
None of the oppositions, with the possible exception of the early Workers
Opposition and Democratic Centralist Opposition, ever dreamed of oppos–
mg or protesting against the measures used until their own fate was in–
volved, and even then tended to confirm the principle while protesting
against its application to their own faction. Under these circumstances,
the most ruthless and consistent and unadulterated embodiment of this
evil side of Bolshevism was the inevitable victor.
6. The whole course of development after Lenin's death, and perhaps
-Souvarine seems undecided on this score-the whole course of develop–
ment since Kronstadt, is one of growing counter-revolution. Milestones are
the political defeats of Trotsky in 1923, of Zinoviev in 1925, of the Zino–
viev-Trotsky bloc in 1927, of Bukharin in 1929, then the ruthless attack
on the masses in the course of forced industrialization and collectivization
of agriculture, the attack on science, art, culture, thought and elementary
decency in the Stalin apotheosis, the development of a counter-revolution–
ary foreign policy, and the blood purge.
7. The direction of this counter-revolutionary development is towards
a growing resumption of the age-old evils of Russian tsarist autocracy,
complicated and enlarged by a vile use of revolutionary demagogy and by
the employment of unprecedented instruments for the control of economic,
political and cultural life: the radio, a one-hundred percent controlled
totalitarian press and publishing apparatus, a complete control over the
movements of 150,000,000 people, and the conviction carried by the mod–
ern tank, bombing plane, machine gun, dictaphone, job-control, and other
devices not available to previous despotisms. The Soviet Union is still in
