LENIN'S HEIR
71
the Trials, falsely, that Trotsky and the other defendants had done, to
Hitler or the Mikado. Then betrayal would have had a plain com–
monsense meaning, as in the case of a strike leader who sells out to
the bosses, or a general who traffics with the enemy. No one has ever
suggested that Stalin has done anything of this sort.
But did he not, it might be replied, "betray" the proletariat,
the masses, and the "principles" of the revolution? It is of course
true that Stalin, in practice, has acted counter to almost all of the
expressed formal principles of communism, and that in practice the
masses who have followed the Bolsheviks with such heroism and
sacrifice and hope'--qualities seen quite as clearly these recent years
under Stalin as during the Civil War years under Lenin-have been
rewarded with slavery and terror and suffering. This, however, is not
a betrayal of the revolution, but an instance of a general law of revolu–
tions; and in particular, not a violation of Bolshevism, properly com–
prehended, but a triumphant application. We cannot understand the
nature of revolutionary or any other social movements by their "prin–
ciples," by their avowed and verbalized program, but only by what
they disclose themselves to be in action. Revolutionary movements
are defined not by what they say but by what they do.
In the course of communism from 1917 until today, and indeed
from the founding of Bolshevism in 1903, there is no discernible
breach in continuity. Bolshevism (communism), described in terms of
its operations in real life from its start,
is
a conspiratorial movement
for the conquest of a monopoly of power in the era of capitalist
disintegration. From this, with suitable adaptation to local and
temporal circumstance, follow naturally its methods, and its specific
aims, including its economic reorganizations. Stalin's triumph was not
"inevitable"-the revolutionary regime might never have taken
power, might have been defeated in the Civil Wars or by the Allied
intervention, might have marched into Germany in 1932-33; and
another individual than Stalin might not have killed quite so many,
lied quite so much, or caused quite such measureless suffering. But
there is not any longer the slightest reason to believe that the develop–
ment of communism in power could be expected to take any course
differing except in lesser details from that it has in fact taken in Rus–
sia. There
is
nothing basic that Stalin has done-until, perhaps,
his
new creative achievement in the program and theory of multi-national
Bolshevism-nothing from the institution of terror as the primary
foundation of the state to the assertion of a political monopoly, the
seeds and even the shoots of which were not planted and flourishing
under Lenin.
