LIONEL ABEL
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democracies of the West. It still would be the case that judged strictly,
Lenin and Stalin would have to be found guilty of crimes. But who,
under the circumstance I have supposed, would be interested in judging
them strictly? I think they would be forgiven their deeds. Hegel
(interpreted by Kojeve) puts the matter thus: an action, however crimi–
nal, may be forgiven, if thanks to it some great purpose can be achieved.
It may be instructive to rclate this notion of Hegel's to Macbeth's
reasoning in Shakespeare's tragedy. For is not Hegel's thought Macbeth's
thought, too? He assumes, because of the witches' prophecies, that if
Fleance lives he, not Macbeth, will become king; thus his own venture in
kingship must end in failure. He will not have established a line of kings,
and thus will not be forgiven the murder of Duncan. Or, for that matter,
of Banquo. Shakespeare, with his customary depth, shows us Macbeth
most wracked by guilt right after he has been told that Fleance has es–
caped his killers. He might have fclt less guilt for murdering the father
had his men also succeeded in murdering the son. One guilt more might
mean less guilt finally, and possibly forgiveness. That is how tyrants, also
modern dictators like Lenin and Stalin, often thought.
Suppose we apply Hegel's reasoning about the morality of great
action to the deeds of the Bolsheviks, and most particularly to those of
their extraordinary leader, Lenin, whom Solzhenitsyn has called a crimi–
nal.
Now is it proper to call him that? No doubt Lenin was responsible
for the killing of thousands of innocent persons whose deaths brought
no advantage
to
him personally or
to
the regime he headed. Was then
Lenin guilty of crime? But the question has still not been properly put in
the terms Hegel has suggested. For what we must ask now is this: Did
Lenin succeed? Was the purpose for which the October Revolution was
undertaken ever realized, even in part? We are now alerted to the fact
that the present-day leaders of the Soviet Union are beginning to think
their revolution anything but a success. (I was told some years ago by
Andrea Calli, an Italian socialist, who had visited Moscow in 1923, and
there read Lenin's famous article "On Cooperation" just as it came off
the press, that anyone who read the piece in Moscow at just that mo–
ment, and had some capacity to read between the lines, would have un–
derstood that for Lenin the revolution had already failed.)
We must note that the crimes committed by the Bolsheviks before
Stalin came to power, and seldom regarded by radicals as crimes, pro–
vided the model for those acts of Stalin which the present-day Soviet
leaders today call criminal. What Lenin ordered, which was not charac–
terized as crime, justified for Stalin the actions Khruschev and the present
Soviet leaders adrrlit were criminal. The praise accorded the ruthless acts
of
Lenin no doubt provided inspiration for Stalin.
