SOVIET COMMUNISM: A MODERN MILLENARIAN REVOLUTION

In the last pages of his pamphlet ‘Literature and Revolution’, published in 1923, Leon Trotsky gives a glimpse of the transformation in human life he believed was within reach. He writes not about changes in society but an alteration in human nature. The change he anticipates will be in the biology of the human species. In the future, he writes,

Even purely physiologic life will become subject to collective experiments. The human species, the coagulated Homo sapiens, will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and, in his own hands, will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and psychophysical training … It is difficult to predict the extent of self-government which the man of the future may reach or the heights to which he may carry his technique. Social construction and psycho-physical self-education will become two aspects of one and the same process. All the arts – literature, drama, painting, music and architecture will lend this process beautiful form. More correctly, the shell in which the cultural construction and self-education of Communist man will be enclosed, will develop all the vital elements of contemporary art to the highest level. Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.⁶

In Trotsky’s view history is the process in which humanity gains control of itself and the world. Just as there are no limits to the growth of human knowledge so there is no limit to human advance in ethics and politics. If there are flaws in human nature science can correct them. This is the true meaning of perfectibility in radical Enlightenment thought: not so much a condition of static perfection as a vision of unbounded human possibility. Trotsky’s vision in which science is used to perfect humanity expresses a recurrent modern fantasy. The belief that science can free humankind from its natural limitations, perhaps even make it immortal, thrives today in cults such as cryogenics, transhumanism and Extropianism that acknowledge their debts to the Enlightenment.⁷

From the start the Bolsheviks aimed to create a new type of human being. Unlike the Nazis they did not see this new humanity in racial terms, but like the Nazis they were ready to employ science and pseudo-science in an attempt to achieve their goal. Human nature was to be altered so that ‘socialist man’ could come into being. Such a project was impossible with the scientific knowledge that was available at the time, but the Bolsheviks were ready to use any method, no matter how inhuman, and adopt any theory however dubious that promised to deliver the transformation of which they dreamt. From the early twenties onwards the Soviet regime harassed genuine scientists. Later, as in Nazi Germany, science was perverted for the purposes of terror. By the late thirties human subjects – German and Japanese prisoners of war, soldiers and diplomats, Poles, Koreans and Chinese, political prisoners and ‘nationalists’ of all kinds (including Jews) – were being used in medical experiments in the Lubyanka prison in the centre of Moscow. Despite attempts to resist the process, science became an integral part of the totalitarian state.⁸

The role of Trofim Lysenko (1898–1976) is well known. Lysenko propagated a version of the Lamarckian theory of evolution, which differed from the Darwinian theory that was accepted by most scientists at the time in claiming that acquired characteristics could be inherited. Lamarck’s theory seemed to open up the possibility that human nature could be progressively improved. Inasmuch as it appeared to extend human power over the natural world, Lamarckism chimed with Marxism, and with Stalin’s support Lysenko was made head of the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Sciences. He was also given free rein in farming, where he claimed to be able to breed new high-yielding strains of wheat. Lysenko’s experiments in agriculture were disastrous, adding to the collapse in food production that accompanied collectivization. His hare-brained ideas retarded the development of biology in the USSR until well into the 1960s and had an even longer influence in Maoist China.

Less well known is the work of Ilya Ivanov, who in the mid-twenties was charged by Stalin with the task of crossbreeding apes with humans. Stalin was not interested in filling the world with replicas of Aristotle and Goethe. He wanted a new breed of soldier – ‘a new invincible human being’, highly resistant to pain, that needed little food or sleep. Ivanov was a horse-breeder who made his reputation in Tsarist times by pioneering the artificial insemination of racehorses, but acting on Stalin’s instructions he turned his attention to primate research. He travelled to West Africa to conduct trials impregnating chimpanzees and set up a research institute in Georgia, Stalin’s birthplace, where humans were impregnated with ape sperm. A number of experiments were attempted, but unsurprisingly all of them failed. Ivanov was arrested, sentenced to a term of imprisonment that was commuted and then exiled to Kazakhstan, where he died in 1931. An obituary appeared by the Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov, who achieved worldwide fame via a series of experiments applying methods of behavioural conditioning to dogs, praising Ivanov’s life and work.⁹

Stalin’s requirements for the new human being were coarsely practical. Yet they embody a project of developing a superior type of human being that recurs time and again in Enlightenment thinkers. It is sometimes questioned whether there ever was such a thing as ‘the Enlightenment project’.¹⁰ Certainly the Enlightenment was a heterogeneous and often contradictory movement. A wide range of beliefs can be found amongst Enlightenment thinkers – atheist and Deist, liberal and anti-liberal, communist and pro-market, egalitarian and racist. Much of the Enlightenment’s history consists of rabid disputes among rival doctrinaires. Yet it cannot be denied that a radical version of Enlightenment thinking came to power with the Bolsheviks, which aimed to alter human life irrevocably.

In Russia there have always been many who looked to Europe to redeem the country from backwardness. When the great Counter-Enlightenment thinker Joseph de Maistre went to live in Russia he declared that he wanted to live among people who had not been ‘scribbled on by philosophers’. To his disappointment he found in St Petersburg an elite that spoke French, revered Voltaire and looked to the philosophes for inspiration. Throughout the nineteenth century Russian thinkers continued to look to Europe. Bakunin the anarchist, Plekhanov the orthodox Marxist, Turgenev the Anglophile liberal –all were convinced that Russia’s future lay in merging into the universal civilization they saw emerging in Europe. So were the Bolsheviks who created the Soviet state. When they talked of turning Russia into a modern state, Lenin and Trotsky spoke in a European voice.

It has become a commonplace that Russia’s misfortune was that the Enlightenment never triumphed in the country. In this view the Soviet regime was a Slavic version of ‘oriental despotism’, and the unprecedented repression it practised was a development of traditional Muscovite tyranny. In Europe Russia has long been seen as a semi-Asiatic country – a perception reinforced by the Marquis de Custine’s famous journal recording his travels in Russia in 1839 in which he argued that Russians were predisposed to servility.¹¹ Theories of oriental despotism have long been current among Marxists seeking to explain why Marx’s ideas had the disastrous results they did in Russia and China. The idea of oriental despotism goes back to Marx himself, who postulated the existence of an ‘Asiatic mode of production’. Later Marxian scholars such as Karl Wittfogel applied it to Russia and China, arguing that totalitarianism in these countries was a product of Asiatic traditions.¹²

As Nekrich and Heller summarize this conventional wisdom:

Western historians draw a direct line from Ivan Vasilievich (Ivan the Terrible) to Joseph Vissarionovich (Stalin) or from Malyuta Skuratov, head of Ivan the Terrible’s bodyguard and secret police force, to Yuri Andropov … thus demonstrating that from the time of the Scythians Russia was inexorably heading for the October Revolution and Soviet power. It was inherent in the national character of the Russian people. Nowhere else, these scholars think, would such a thing be possible.¹³

It is true that Russia never belonged fully in the West. Eastern Orthodoxy defined itself in opposition to western Christianity, and there was nothing in Russia akin to the Reformation or the Renaissance. From the time of the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1543 the idea developed that Moscow was destined to be a ‘third Rome’ that would lead the Christian world from the east. In the nineteenth century an influential group of Slavophil thinkers argued on similar lines and suggested that Russia’s difference from the West was a virtue. Rejecting western individualism they maintained that Russian folk traditions embodied a superior form of life. This anti-western strand of thought developed into a belief in Russia’s unique role in world history that may have helped sustain the communist regime. The Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev believed that Russian communism ‘is more traditional than is commonly thought and is a transformation and deformation of the old Russian messianic idea’.¹⁴ Certainly there were messianic strands in Bolshevism. Anatoli Lunacharsky, a Bolshevik who was expelled from the party by Lenin for ideological deviancy but who later became Soviet Minister of Education, noted these points of affinity in a book on Socialismand Religion in 1907 and commented on the way in which Christian ideas about the Day of Judgement and Christ’s millennial reign had been reproduced in socialism.¹⁵ It is also true that the Revolution inspired apocalyptic hopes in Russia. In 1918 the Symbolist poet Alexander Blok published ‘The Twelve’, in which a band of twelve Red Guards march through the streets of Petrograd led by the figure of Christ under a red flag. Secular and religious forms of messianism are not mutually exclusive – they joined forces in the American Utopian Right, for example. For a time it may have seemed to a few that the new Soviet regime embodied a Russian messianic tradition. But reactionary Russian messianism was not an expansionist creed. For the most part it saw Russia as a redoubt of virtue in a fallen world. It was not this anti-western messianism that came to power in Russia with the October Revolution.

The Bolsheviks wanted to surpass the West by achieving its most radical ideals. They did not aim to emulate actually existing western societies (as late Tsarism did with some success). Lenin wanted to ransplant the core institutions of western capitalism, such as work discipline and the factory system, into Russia. He was an ardent missionary for two of the most advanced capitalist techniques – ‘Taylorism’, the American technique of ‘scientific management’, and ‘Fordism’, American assembly-line mass production. As the Bolshevik leader described his programme, ‘The combination of the Russian revolutionary sweep with American efficiency is the essence of Leninism.’¹⁶ In a similar way Trotsky demanded the ‘militarization of labour’ – a work system in which the discipline of the capitalist factory was carried to a higher level. But Bolshevik goals went far beyond installing the work discipline and techniques of mass production of western capitalism. Central among them was realizing the Enlightenment utopia that the Jacobins and the Paris Commune failed to achieve. Russia’s misfortune was not in failing to absorb the Enlightenment but in being exposed to the Enlightenment in one of its most virulent forms.

Contrary to the views of most western historians, there are few strands of continuity linking Tsarism with Bolshevism. Lenin came to power as a result of a conjunction of accidents. If Russia had withdrawn from the First World War, the Germans had not given Lenin their support, Kerensky’s Menshevik provisional government had been more competent or the military coup attempted against the Mensheviks by General Kornilov in September 1917 had not failed, the Bolshevik Revolution would not have occurred. Terror of the kind practised by Lenin cannot be explained by Russian traditions, or by the conditions that prevailed at the time the Bolshevik regime came to power. Civil war and foreign military intervention created an environment in which the survival of the new regime was threatened from the start; but the brunt of the terror it unleashed was directed against popular rebellion. The aim was not only to remain in power. It was to alter and reshape Russia irreversibly. Starting with the Jacobins in late eighteenth-century France and continuing in the Paris Commune, terror has been used in this way wherever a revolutionary dictatorship has been bent on achieving utopian goals. The Bolsheviks aimed to make an Enlightenment project that had failed in France succeed in Russia. In believing that Russia had to be made over on a European model they were not unusual. Where they were distinctive was in their belief that this required terror, and here they were avowed disciples of the Jacobins. Whatever other purposes it may have served – such as the defence of Bolshevik power against foreign intervention and popular rebellion – Lenin’s use of terror flowed from his commitment to this revolutionary project.

Lenin presented his vision of the society he aimed to achieve in his book State and Revolution. He wrote this utopian tract in August-September 1917 while in hiding in Finland from the Russian Provisional Government, and he originally meant it to appear under a pseudonym. History moved faster than he expected and copies appeared under his own name in 1918, with a second edition appearing a year later. Lenin attached some importance to the book, instructing that if he were killed it must still be published at all costs. It remains the best guide to his picture of the future.

State and Revolution is firmly rooted in the thought of Marx. Citing the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat that Marx coined in a letter of 1852, Lenin uses the Paris Commune of 1870–71 as the model for the revolutionary government of Russia and the world. In future there would be no state in the sense understood in modern times. Standing armies and police forces would be abolished. Everyone would take part in government. Public officials would enjoy no privileges and receive a worker’s income. Lenin did not imagine that the installation of this new order would occur without a struggle. A small minority would resist, and the suppression of this resistance was the principal function of the new state. Lenin left no doubt that the new regime would have nothing in common with bourgeois democracy. As he put it in a note published in 1920: ‘The scientific term “dictatorship” means nothing more or less than authority untrammelled by any laws, absolutely unrestricted by any rules whatever, and based directly on force.’¹⁷

In State and Revolution Lenin asserts that in a proletarian dictatorship there would be no need for coercion of the masses, for the new regime would exist only to serve them. At the same time the dictatorship would need to act ruthlessly against its enemies. Here again Lenin was only repeating Marx. In their address to the Communist League in London in March 1850, Marx and Engels are clear that terror will be an integral part of the revolution:

Above all, during and immediately after the struggle the workers, so far as it is at all possible, must oppose bourgeois attempts at pacification and force the democrats to carry out their terroristic phrases … Far from opposing so-called excesses – instances of popular vengeance against hated individuals or against public buildings with which hateful memories are associated – the workers’ party must not only tolerate these actions but give them direction.¹⁸

While Lenin – following Marx – maintained terror would only be used against remnants of the old order, it was actually turned most severely on workers and peasants. In part this can be explained by the circumstances in which the Bolsheviks seized power. The October Revolution was a by-product of the First World War and of the ensuing chaos in Russia. The new Soviet regime faced several years of civil war that could easily have ended in victory for their opponents, generally referred to as the Whites. Some type of authoritarian rule may have been unavoidable in these conditions. But they cannot account for the scale and intensity of Bolshevik repression, which was the result of attempting to reconstruct society on an unworkable model.

From its beginnings the Soviet state was involved in hostage-taking, mass executions and the establishment of concentration camps, none of which existed in late Tsarist Russia. When the Socialist Revolutionary Fanny Kaplan wounded Lenin in an assassination attempt on 30 August 1918, the Cheka – the Extraordinary Commission conceived by Lenin in the aftermath of the October Revolution and founded in December 1917 – was ordered to carry out a ‘merciless mass terror’. Hundreds were executed. A system of hostages was set up to ensure obedience in suspect groups – an innovation Trotsky, one of the pioneers of twentieth-century state terror, later defended.¹⁹ It was Trotsky who established concentration camps in June 1918, initially for the detention of Czechs fighting against the Red Army and then for former Tsarist officers who refused to join it. Repression was soon extended to peasants who were subjected to forcible grain requisitioning. In 1921 the revolt of a few thousand sailors in Kron-stadt was suppressed by around 50,000 Red Army troops (a repressive measure Trotsky – the founder of the Red Army – also defended).²⁰ Most of the sailors ended up in camps, where many died. From 1918 onwards a rash of peasant revolts spread across much of Russia, and from 1920 to 1921 the civil war became a peasant insurgency. The Bolsheviks were determined to crush peasant resistance. Entire villages were deported to the Russian north, and at the end of 1921 around 80 per cent of the people being held in camps were peasants or workers.²¹

It is commonly believed that the Soviet security apparatus was inherited from late Tsarism. Certainly Peter the Great used the forced labour of convicts – not least in building St Petersburg, an enduring Russian symbol of modernity. Yet on the eve of revolution in 1916 only 28,600 convicts were serving sentences of forced labour.²² There is a huge disparity between the size of the penal and security apparatus in Tsarist Russia and that established by the Bolsheviks. In 1895 the Okhrana (Department of Police) had only 161 full-time members. Including operatives working in other departments it may have reached around 15,000 by October 1916. In comparison, the Cheka had a minimum of 37,000 operatives in 1919 and in 1921 reached over a quarter of a million. There is a similar disparity between the numbers of executions. During the late Tsarist period from 1866 to 1917 there were around 14,000 executions, while in the early Soviet period from 1917 to 1923 the Cheka carried out around 200,000 executions.²³

The techniques of repression employed by the Bolsheviks owed more to recent western practice than to the Tsarist past. In creating the camps they were following a European colonial model. Concentration camps were used by Spain to quell insurgents in colonial Cuba at the end of the nineteenth century and by the British in South Africa during the Boer War. Around the same time they were established in German South-West Africa, when the German authorities committed genocide on the Herero tribe. (The first imperial commissioner of German South-West Africa was the father of Hermann Goering, and medical experiments were carried out on indigenous people by two of the teachers of Joseph Mengele.²⁴)

The Bolshevik repression of intellectual freedom was also of a different order from anything that had existed before in Russia. In the past, a number of writers and political activists had been sent into exile. The radical writer Alexander Herzen left Russia for Paris, London and Italy. Lenin spent time in Siberia and much of his life in Switzerland, Germany, Britain and other European countries. However, it was only after the Bolshevik seizure of power that Russian intellectuals experienced mass deportation. In the autumn of 1922, two ships sailed from Petrograd containing some of the most creative members of the Russian intelligentsia – writers, philosophers, literary critics, theologians, historians and others – that Lenin had selected for involuntary emigration. Arrested by the political police, the GPU, these eminent Russian figures were deported (along with their families) because they were out of tune with the new regime. The episode passed almost unnoticed at the time and was barely mentioned during the Cold War. The expellees settled in Paris, Berlin, Prague and other European cities, some of them – like Nikolai Berdyaev –establishing a new life, many others vanishing into poverty and obscurity. Lesley Chamberlain, who has given the first comprehensive account of the mass deportation, notes that this neglect ‘is all the more astonishing, since it was Lenin himself, the leader of the Bolsheviks and the founder of the Soviet Union, who masterminded the deportation and chose many of his victims by name’. She comments that ‘Though they could never have described themselves that way, the 1922 expellees were the first dissidents from Soviet totalitarianism.’²⁵ It is a description that captures the novelty of Lenin’s regime.

The methods of repression used by the Bolsheviks were not an inheritance from Tsarism. They were new, and they were adopted in the pursuit of utopian goals. The central role of the security apparatus in the new Soviet state was required by its project of remaking society – an aspiration no traditional tyranny has had, and which the Tsars certainly lacked. As has been correctly noted, ‘Prior to the appearance of the Soviet party-state, history offered few, if any, precedents of a millenarian, security-focused system.’²⁶ To call the Soviet state a tyranny is to apply an antique typology to a system that was radically modern.

Western opinion followed the Bolsheviks in seeing the Soviet regime as an attempt to realize the ideals of the French Revolution. It is a telling fact that Soviet communism was most popular in the West when terror was at its height. After visiting the Soviet Union in 1934 – when around five million people had perished in the Ukrainian famine – the British Labourite intellectual Harold Laski declared: ‘Never in history has man attained the same level of perfection as in the Soviet regime.’ In much the same vein, in 1935 the renowned Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb published a book entitled Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? (In later editions of the book the question mark was dropped.) For these western enthusiasts Stalinism was the highest point in human progress. The American literary critic Edmund Wilson went still further. In the Soviet Union, he wrote, ‘I felt as though I were in a moral sanctuary, where the light never stops shining.’²⁷ Western progressive intellectuals were never in any doubt that the USSR was a regime dedicated to Enlightenment ideals. They would have been horrified at the suggestion that the Soviet state was no more than Tsarist despotism in a new guise. It was only when it was clear that the Soviet system had failed to achieve any of its goals that its use of terror was explained as a Tsarist inheritance.

For the most part western opinion saw in the Stalinist Soviet Union an image of its utopian fantasies, and it projected the same image on to Maoist China, where the human cost of communism was even greater. Some thirty-eight million people perished between 1958 and 1961 in the Great Leap Forward. As Jung Chang and Jon Halliday have written: ‘This was the greatest famine of the twentieth century – and of all recorded human history. Mao knowingly starved and worked these millions of people to death.’²⁸ As they did in the Soviet Union, the peasants suffered most from a policy – alien to Chinese traditions – that aimed to subjugate the natural environment to human ends. Around a hundred million were coerced into working on irrigation projects. Often without proper tools, they used doors and planks taken from their homes to construct dams, reservoirs and canals – most of which collapsed or were abandoned. In a spectacular display of the Promethean spirit sparrows were deemed pests fit only for extermination. The peasants were ordered to wave sticks and brooms so that the birds would fall exhausted from the sky and could be killed. The result was a plague of insects. A secret message had then to be sent to the Soviet embassy in Beijing requesting that hundreds of thousands of sparrows be sent as soon as possible from the Soviet Far East.²⁹

The cultural cost of the Maoist regime was evident in the Great Proletarian Revolution of 1966–7. Like the Bolsheviks, Mao saw the persistence of the past as the chief obstacle to building a new future. China’s ancient traditions had to be wiped from memory. In effect the Maoist regime declared war on Chinese civilization. Yet it was during the Cultural Revolution – a politically engineered mass frenzy that had an undeniable millenarian dimension – that the regime achieved its highest level of popularity in the west. As with Stalinism, western opinion saw Mao’s regime as dedicated to an Enlightenment ideal of universal emancipation: terror was a necessary phase in the conversion of an Asiatic tyranny to western ideals of freedom and progress. Again, it was only when its catastrophic results could no longer be denied that Chinese communism was condemned as a form of oriental despotism. Rather than being results of an attempt to apply a modern western ideology, the crimes of the Maoist regime could then safely be seen as vestiges of traditional barbarism. When Maoism was abandoned, western opinion interpreted its rejection as the beginning of a process of westernization, when in fact – as in the case of the collapse of the Soviet system – it was the opposite. Post-Mao China rejected a western ideology not in order to adopt another one, but in order to carve out a path of development that owed little to any western model. Given China’s worsening ecological problems and the social dislocation that has accompanied the phasing out of the ‘iron rice bowl’, which ensured lifetime employment and basic welfare for most of the population, the upshot remains in doubt; but the period in which China struggled to implement a western ideology is over.

Wherever it has come to power communism has meant a radical break with the past. Late Tsarism had far more in common with fin de siècle Prussia than with the Soviet system.³⁰ The late Tsarist period had dark blemishes – it witnessed many pogroms, for example – but in terms of its overall record it compares favourably with many countries in the world today and it was incomparably less repressive than the Soviet regime. In employing terror as an instrument of social engineering the Bolsheviks were self-consciously continuing the Jacobin tradition. Just as the Jacobins had liquidated the remnants of the old regime it was necessary to eliminate residues of reaction that could be found in all sections of Russian society. As Nekrich and Heller have written: ‘Lenin was obsessed with two historical precedents: first, the Jacobins, who were defeated because they did not guillotine enough people; and second, the Paris Commune, which was defeated because its leaders did not shoot enough people.’³¹

The safety of the revolution required active measures against human remnants of the past. One of the first acts of the regime announced in January 1918 was to create a new category of ‘disenfranchised person’ whose members could be deprived of rights –including the right to food. Around five million people fell into this category and were subject to a class-based system of rationing created later that year. It was against this background of the disenfranchisement of whole categories of people that the Great Terror took place. As Kolakowski, author of the definitive study of the rise and collapse of Marxism, has put it, ‘Stalinism was the natural and obvious continuation of the system of government established by Lenin and Trotsky.’³² The millions of deaths that accompanied Stalin’s policies of agricultural collectivization were larger than anything contemplated by Lenin but they were a consequence of policies that Lenin began. In turn, Lenin’s policies were genuine attempts to realize Marxian communism.

Despite Marx’s repudiation of utopian thinking, his vision of communism is itself thoroughly utopian. As I noted in the last chapter, no one can ever know enough to plan the course of an advanced economy. But the utopian quality of Marx’s ideal does not come only from the impossible demands it makes on the knowledge of the planners. It arises even more from the clash between the ideal of harmony and the diversity of human values. Central planning involves an enormous concentration of power, without – as Lenin made clear in his ‘scientific’ definition of proletarian dictatorship – any institutional checks. A system of arbitrary rule of this kind is bound to encounter resistance. The values of the regime will surely not be those of everyone or even the majority. Most people will continue to be attached to things – religion, nationality or family – the regime sees as atavistic. Others will cherish activities – such as aesthetic contemplation or romantic love – that make no contribution to social reconstruction. Whether they actively resist the new regime or – like Dr Zhivago in Boris Pasternak’s novel – simply insist on going their own way, there will be many who do not share the regime’s vision of the good life. While every Utopia claims to embody the best life for all of humankind, it is never more than one ideal among many. A society without private property or money may seem idyllic to some people but to others it looks like a vision of hell. For some it may seem obvious that a world ruled by altruism would be best, while for others it would be insufferably insipid. All societies contain divergent ideals of life. When a utopian regime collides with this fact the result can only be repression or defeat. Utopianism does not cause totalitarianism – for a totalitarian regime to come into being many other factors are necessary – but totalitarianism follows whenever the dream of a life without conflict is consistently pursued through the use of state power.

The Bolsheviks were practitioners of what Karl Popper described as utopian social engineering, which aims to reconstruct society by altering it all at once.³³ For the utopian social engineer it is not enough to reform institutions piecemeal. Society as it presently exists is beyond redemption. It must be destroyed in order to create a new way of life. One difficulty of utopian social engineering is that it contains no method for correcting mistakes. The theory that guides the construction of Utopia is taken to be infallible; any deviation from it is treated as error or treason. There may be tactical retreats and switches of direction – as when in 1921 Lenin abandoned War Communism and adopted the New Economic Policy allowing peasants to keep their own grain – but the utopian model remains beyond criticism. However, given the fact of human fallibility the model is sure to contain flaws, some of which may be fatal. The result of persisting in the attempt to realize it is bound to be a society very different from the one that was envisaged. This is not a process confined to the Soviet Union and other communist states. It is evident in Iraq, where a hardly less ambitious attempt at utopian engineering was made. Predictably, the failure of the project has been ascribed to deficiencies in its execution and the recalcitrance of the Iraqi people rather than any defects in the project itself.

Destroying an existing social order for the sake of an ideal is irrational, as Popper argued. Where Popper went astray was in supposing that by demonstrating the irrationality of utopianism he had disposed of it. To dissect the errors in Marxian theory that underpinned Lenin’s State and Revolution may be useful, but the utopian mentality is not nurtured on falsifiable social theories. It feeds on myths, which cannot be refuted. For Lenin and Trotsky, terror was a way of remaking society and shaping a new type of human being. The goal of the new Soviet regime was a world where humanity would flourish as never before. In order to achieve this end it was ready to sacrifice millions of human lives. The Bolsheviks believed the new world could come into being only after the destruction of the old.

Russia under Soviet rule did witness something like an apocalypse. While no aspect of life was untouched, the change was most complete in the camps. Varlam Shalamov, who spent seventeen years working in the mines of Kolyma – a section of the Gulag, finally covering a tenth of Soviet territory, in which around a third of the inmates died every year – described the events following the arrival in the camp of bulldozers donated under the American Lend-Lease programme. Meant to assist in the war against Nazism, the bulldozers were used to dispose of thousands of frozen bodies that emerged when mass graves dating from an earlier period of camp life were uncovered:

These graves, enormous stone pits, were filled to the brim with corpses. The bodies had not decayed; they were just bare skeletons over which stretched dirty, scratched skin bitten all over by lice.

The north resisted with all its strength this work of man, not accepting the corpses into its bowels. Defeated, humbled, retreating, stone promised to forget nothing, to wait and preserve its secret. The severe winters, the hot summers, the winds, the six years of rain had not wrenched the dead men from the stone. The earth opened, baring its subterranean storerooms, for they contained not only gold and lead, tungsten and uranium but also undecaying human bodies.

These human bodies slid down the slope, perhaps attempting to rise …³⁴

While it had apocalyptic consequences the Bolshevik revolution failed to usher in the Millennium. Tens of millions died for nothing. Even now the number of deaths resulting from forced collectivization cannot be known with certainty, but Stalin boasted to Churchill that it reached ten million. Robert Conquest has estimated the overall number of deaths in the Great Terror at around twice that figure –an estimate that is likely to be fairly accurate.³⁵ The toll in broken lives was incalculably larger. The land itself was scarred with man-made deserts and dead or dying lakes and rivers. The Stalinist Soviet Union became the site of the largest humanly induced ecological disasters – probably only surpassed by those in Maoist China.³⁶

The Soviet Union survived the Second World War, in which its people made a decisive contribution to defeating Nazism. In the period immediately after the war there were some who anticipated a thaw in the Stalinist system; but in fact millions who had fought heroically ended up in the Gulag. The Cold War years saw several attempts at liberalization, including Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin’s ‘cult of personality’ at the party congress in 1956; but when a systematic attempt was made to renew the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev it collapsed. By then the Soviet system was an empty shell held together by corruption and inertia, and though it maintained peace throughout its vast territories and supplied a kind of security to its citizens that they were later to lose, it had little popular legitimacy. Even the Soviet elite lacked the will to defend the system, and when Gorbachev’s naive effort at reform triggered its collapse a state founded on terror fell apart without violence in a débâcle unprecedented in history. In the chaos that followed, the new humanity that the Soviet regime had been founded to create was nowhere to be seen. Human life had been altered, but in a process that had more in common with the alteration described in Kafka’s Metamorphosis than with anything dreamt by Marx, Lenin or Trotsky.