LIONEL ABEL
On the Crimes of Lenin,
Stalin, and Hitler
For Albert Goldman'
In
the late summer of 1945, I took issue with James Burnham (in Dwight
Macdonald's
Politics)
for having maintained earlier that year (in the Jan–
uary issue of
Partisan Review)
that Stalin was the logical and appropriate
successor to Lenin in the Communist hierarchy. A Marxist - and much
more long-winded - argument to the same effect was given during the
seventies by Jean-Paul Sartre (in the second volume of his
Critique de Ia
raison dialectique).
Here Sartre tried to show that Stalin was chosen to be
Lenin's successor, not just by the will of the Communist Party, arbitrary
and manipulable as that no doubt was, but by the October Revolution
itself, whose needs
required
the Party to reject Trotsky's bid for power
and to endorse Stalin's.
I am convinced today that I was wrong in my condemnation of
Burnham's article, and that he was substantially correct in his evaluation
of Stalin as Lenin's approPFiate successor, as was Sartre in his more recent
discussion of the matter. Burnham was of course aware of Stalin's crimes,
as was Saretre too, but each had his own prudential reasons for not say–
ing in so many words that the dictator was a criminal, something any
hack journalist, even of the left, may now do regularly. Which brings me
to a question
not
regularly asked: if Stalin for all his criminality was the
rightful heir of Lenin, then can Lenin have been innocent of crime?
More than a decade ago, when Lenin, and Stalin, too, had armies
of journalistic defenders, Solzhenitsyn told us that in his judgment Lenin
was a criminal. In fact, Burnham and Sartre have said the same, at least
by implication. For to authenticate Stalin politically as Lenin's heir is to
•Author's Note: Albert Goldman was Trotsky's defense attorney in Mexico at the
Dewey Committee's inquiry into the charges made against Trotsky in the Moscow
Trials.
